The Club's Training Facilities

I don't know why you're making an issue of it @vin weasel your usually so positive with regards the club, nothing wrong with the pitch near the car park.
I'm sure if there was the opposition would soon be reporting it to the appropriate people, we had to pick dog dirt up before we could play, yes I've seen people walking their dogs most being responsible dog owners who pick the dog dirt up, and many walk around the perimeter of the pitch.
Not sure what the problem is with parking as many come to school with their rich mummy's or daddies and I believe there are facilities to board at Woodhouse Grove if required.
As yourself I've been down many times mostly under the McCall/Parkinson times and watched training on both the front pitch, the back pitch under the railway bridge and at times the all weather pitch and the players seem more than happy with the facilities, obviously I'm not privy to the facilities inside but I believe those three videos show we have everything we need as a professional football club.

 

I can understand Lee Sharps comments as with any Ex Premier League player they are wrapped up in cotton wool from the minute they sign, any problems (dentist, doctors etc) ring the club and it's sorted.

 

Well as we know new training facilities will not be on offer any time soon so what do we do as a club if we don't use the facilities at Woodhouse Grove.
I do agree by the way to with regards resent soft tissue injuries, have they always been a problem and if so is it the facilities or our training schedules ?.
With regards your 25th Year comment I assume you mean the deal with regards the stadium as I very much doubt the deal with Woodhouse Grove is on that sort of lease.

 

When we won thr title under Cherry we trained in the car park and ran up and down the main stand steps to improve stamina. We won the title with a usable squad off only 15 so injuries in training were very every few

 

I’m not advocating to stop using Woodhouse, I’m questioning the ambition of the club and whether it sees owning its own training facility as something in a longer term plan. The suggestion of utilising Richards Dunn is a good one if the will and money was there.

 

Neither are

 

Would the MK Dons own their own training facilities if it is part of the new set up at MK Bowl1? Isn't the plan a combined set up with various bits for different things on a shared site?

 

Happens loads in the Scottish leagues. Teams training in the Glasgow/Edinburgh regions then playing over an hour away if not more.

 

Under the cosh podcast this week features Tim Sherwood. Blackburn won the Premier League training in a park. The staff clearing the pitch of dog poo before they trained. Sherwood said the lack of facilities are an excuse. If you want to succeed you succeed despite such issues. Our training facilities may not be cutting edge but they were good enough for outr Premier League team and Blackburns PL winners. It’s a smokescreen

 

The thing is, when you ask anyone that is complaining about our training facilities what it is they think we need that we don't already have at Woodhouse Grove, you either get no response at all, or they say we need to own it/we shouldn't be training at a school. If Woodhouse Grove was some exclusive members club rather than a school, I very much doubt there would be any complaints at all.

 

Status! It hasn’t the status of club owned training ground. Most have not had a proper look at the facilities. I think GA raised a valid point when he could get a training session at short notice because the school had booked it elsewhere as the club don’t need it on a Saturday afternoon. In my view Sparks could have had an alternative just in case, but tbh it is very rare that kind of clash would happen again. Until we get promoted it is not a priority.

 

Yes, that was a bit tin pot but like you say, a rare occurance. Hopefully it's one of the things Sharpe will be looking at going forward to make sure we have good contingency plans in place not just for postponed games, but also to make sure we have alternative facilities if/when the weather causes problems.

 

While I agree that the whining about our current facilities is ridiculous, we also have to move on from the "we trained on a field 30 years ago if that was good enough then it should be good enough now" mentality.

Football and sports science has moved on rapidly since then, so we need appropriate facilities to keep up - but there is nothing to suggest that we don't have them.

This is why we need someone like David Sharpe in the setup, he has knowledge of footballing operations and ways of doing things at clubs at a similar level and should be able to identify if, and where, we are lacking, which has been missing from the club for too long.

 

I think the majority view is what we have is good enough, it's just the few dissenters who keep bringing it up, those that wouldn't be happy unless we owned the ground and the training pitches and use our current status as an excuse to bash the club for anything.

Lets concentrate the money we have on building a team capable of getting us up the league and then worry about the incidentals.

 

I will buy a new state of the art training ground when win the £130 million tonight.

 

The same Lee Sharp that Fergie once had to drag out of crack den ?