Huddersfield Town should be as well prepared for the new Skybet Championship season as any squad in the history of the club.
That’s the view of former Leeds Road striker Dale Tempest, now 50 and Skybet’s public relations chief.
Tempest spent two seasons with Town, from 1984-86, scoring 27 goals in 65 appearances for then manager Mick Buxton’s team.
In his playing days, Tempest says they never went near a heart-rate monitor or cardio-vascular indicator during pre-season – and he believes the stars of today should lap up the chance to be in peak physical shape for the August 9 big kick-off.
“In my day, we certainly wouldn’t have been back for pre-season training in June, like many clubs have been this year,” said Tempest, who signed for Town from Fulham and went on to play for Gillingham, Lokeren in Belgium and Colchester United before going to Hong Kong (who he represented in World Cup qualifiers).
“We used to meander back in the second week of July and I have to say that compared with today, even back in the 1980s, the approach to pre-season was so unprofessional compared with the preparation they get now.
“We would be weighed, yes, but that was that. There was no-one taking your pulse, checking your heart rate or taking your blood-oxygen levels.
“No-one either making sure you were properly hydrated, or anything like that. It was no-one’s fault, that’s just how it was in British football at that time.”
Tempest enjoyed keeping fit and the training side of football, which is why he played for the best part of 20 years, but he reckons there was precious little education about nutrition or summer fitness programmes.
“There was no science to it whatsoever,” said Tempest. “If there was a chip butty in the canteen when we came back for pre-season, it wouldn’t put some players off eating it!
“I feel very jealous of players these days and it’s nothing to do with the money they earn – but I would have loved to have been taken and made and fit and healthy as I possibly could be.
“I would have loved the education side of it as well and knowing how to properly look after myself.
“We just ate and drank anything we wanted and then just ran until we either fell over or broke down.
“Our pre-season was in an era when you just ran and ran and ran. You literally ran until you couldn’t run any more – and this lasted every day for two weeks.
“You never saw a football in the first two weeks, but with all the running, even lads who came back overweight were burning so many calories that it didn’t take them too long to get some match fitness when we started playing.
“I would have just loved the attention to detail which is provided nowadays.”
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