Ewood Park

We had the usual training session in the morning, but we had something different today in that rather than going out on the pitch, we went to the gym. Obviously, as footballers, we did some workouts for our legs. We started with 30 minutes on the bike which was terribly agonising. It involved some normal sitting down cycling to cycling with resistance, cycling standing up and sprinting often. After tiring out our quadriceps, we worked on our hamstrings by doing some squats. It was very satisfying because although I've thought many times about doing squats at the gym back in Hong Kong, I never quite got around to it. But now, I will obviously doing that workout back in Hong Kong. We did a couple more workouts such as pulling our leg back with resistance and lifting a weight with one hand from the floor to above my head while balancing on one foot.

After an hour of the gym, we had a very special opportunity to visit Blackburn Rovers' home ground, Ewood Park. It was brilliant to see not only the football pitch and the stands, but the changing rooms, suites and conference room as well. The pitch was especially inspirational for becoming a professional football player as you can imagine yourself walking onto the perfectly flat grass pitch with tens of thousands of people watching you.

After having lunch at Ewood Park, we came back for an afternoon session which started at the gym again. This time we did more workouts than cardiovascular fitness as we worked more on our legs and our shoulders as well. My legs seem strong but my shoulders struggled at times. I actually impressed the coach at one point when I was doing the leg extension, one of my favourite workouts. I almost maxed out the machine and probably could have done with only one rep. The furthest I went was 10 reps of 155 lbs. Seems like I've improved since Hong Kong. After a while in the gym, we moved on outside to do some target practice at the wall. We practiced different types of kicks such as a blast straight through the middle and curves. I was very pleased to find the technique of your body when kicking certain types of kick and I can therefore practice correctly. Hitting the wall, alternated to hit a moving ball rather than a dead ball and later we played the hitting the wall game where in turns you would try to hit the wall and if you miss you were out. This game was particularly fun because due to the large field of grass, the ball could go flying miles out and the next person would have to kick it from there. I did have one embarrassing moment where the ball ended right in front of the wall, about five metres away, and I was about to blast the ball so that it would rebound really far away and trouble the next player. But, it seemed as if I didn't kick the ball in the centre enough and therefore the ball went flying over the wall.

Although I just explained a very embarrassing moment of the day, overall I felt much more confident playing football. I think it was because I trained hard last week and had a break over the weekend and therefore recovered into a better footballer. One time, James kicked the ball up in the air, about 20 metres in the air at least, and I controlled with my back heel and passed it straight to my coach behind me. The weird thing is that I meant to do that, but I never expected it.

The confidence stayed until we went to train with the U-15 and U-16 players. I wasn't scared when I went to training and it seemed to show as my passing was generally better in the keeping possession game. My performance seemed better than before, not forcibly better than the U-16 players, but better than I have ever played. I therefore looked forward to play the game in the end. But our training was cut short, as the coach suggested that we should rest so to prevent injury since we've been training all day and will do tomorrow as well. I insisted that I can still play but it was inevitable so we went back to hotel earlier than usual and ate at the restaurant with me having a nice caesar salad with bacon, chicken and anchovies.