Pre-season. A time most football fans dread. The boredom of empty Saturdays and hollow rumours. Fixtures against teams you’d struggle to pinpoint on a map, let alone within the football pyramid. But how important are these fixtures and can they give us a guide to the upcoming League One season?
Take Bristol City, runaway champions in 2014-15. Losing 2-1 to Weston-Super-Mare of the Conference South hardly suggests the form that saw them romp to glory in such style. On the other side of the spectrum were Yeovil Town. Despite underwhelming draws against Basingstoke and Torquay, they also gained a credible draw against Reading and impressive wins against Bristol Rovers and Plymouth.
Thus it appears that results in pre-season are not a good indicator of form at the beginning of the season. Managers frequently wheel out the cliché that performances are all that matter in pre-season. This certainly has merit in the lower leagues where the rapid player turnover increases the need for a squad to gel in double-quick time.
Gillingham’s Perilous Pre-Season
Gillingham are having to incorporate Ryan Jackson into the starting XI at right-back; Bradley Garmston played barely a handful of games last season at left-back/left wing-back; Rory Donnelly will almost certainly debut up front. But the signings are not done yet and it looks certain that if Edinburgh has his way then Gillingham will play 5-3-2 and there will be new players at centre-back, holding midfield as well as a new goalkeeper to challenge Morris for the no.1 jersey. Therefore come August 8th there may be as many as six new faces lining up against Sheffield United, and maybe more. Blackpool, on the other hand, may be struggling to fill their subs bench.
This has a downside though in the possibility of injuries. Against Tonbridge Angels on Saturday, Gillingham’s Josh Hare suffered, possibly, a re-occurrence of the knee injury which kept him out of the majority of last season. Go back a few years and there is the case of Adam Birchall. Adam signed from Dover for a considerable fee, but in a pre-season game against Welling in 2011 he missed the entirety of that season. During his three year stay at the Gills he managed just 17 appearances scoring one goal in the FA Cup against Scunthorpe.
In Gillingham’s championship-winning season in 2012-13 Martin Allen alleged that a large degree of the credit must go to the pre-season tour in Le Touquet. Board games, strong discipline and early bed-times forged a bond between the players and an impressive fitness that was invaluable in the latter stages when the attritional football of League Two was most in evidence.
More often than not though, the main purpose pre-season serves is to fill in the gaps. Fans get a glimpse of new kits, new players; a new outlook on the season as heavily optimistic predictions flood into forums and twitter.
