McKenna Looking Forward to Austria Trips
Saturday, 8th Jul 2023 10:11

Boss Kieran McKenna says he’s looking forward to the Blues’ two pre-season trips to Austria with the squad flying out for their training camp tomorrow.

Town will initially be in Austria for a week before playing two friendlies next Saturday, a behind-closed-doors game against Slovakian side Spartak Trnava in the morning and against Flyeralarm Admira in front of fans at their motion_invest Arena in the afternoon.

“We’re looking forward to getting out there,” McKenna said. “We’ve got a full training week. The weather’s going to be very, very hot, so that can have some physiological benefits as well.

“We’ve been working tactically but a lot of it has been taking our physical levels, trying to push them to a new level because the Championship is a much harder division by those metrics. So we’ve worked really hard over the last couple of weeks on that.

“But we plan to and want to ramp things up tactically as a team, work on our play more, in and out of possession. We’ve been doing that work but that will be an even bigger focus next week.

“And then we finish off the week with two friendlies, should be two competitive matches. Hopefully get lots of minutes into lots of players and it should be a good week.”

The Blues will return to Austria to take part in the Innsbruck Cup on Friday 28th July where they will take on Bundesliga sides RB Leipzig and SV Werder Bremen in two 60-minute matches.

“We’re really looking forward to that,” McKenna continued. “We’ve known about it for a while but until the club announce it, obviously we can’t speak about it.

“It’s the last weekend before the season starts and in the week before the season starts we’ve got Luton, who are going to be going into the Premier League, and we finish off the week with games against two top level Bundesliga teams.

“It’s going to be a great week to get games against high level opposition to really challenge ourselves and get a good spread of minutes, maybe 210 minutes across the Monday and the Tuesday night and the Friday, so a chance to get minutes into lots of players and really good competitive minutes that I think will help us prepare for the big game the following weekend.”

Photo: Matchday Images

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