Antonio Conte started work at Chelsea today but the Italian has kept low-key. There was a training session for a number of our first-team players at Cobham in preparation for pre-season, including John Terry, Diego Costa, Willian, Jon Obi Mikel and Branislav Ivanovic.
Young players such as Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Kenedy, Bertrand Traore and Baba Rahman also took part in the session. It will be very intriguing in the coming weeks to see how Conte will utilise such talented youngsters at his disposal.
Players who were involved in the latter stages of the Copa America or EURO 2016 will join up with the squad later in pre-season, the club has confirmed on their website today.
The aforementioned players, and a few members of the Chelsea #LoanArmy, will be at Cobham training ground every day this work before flying out to Austria for our first pre-season tour on Friday, where we will face Rapid Vienna in our first game on Saturday while concluding our trip against RZ Pellets next Wednesday.
It will probably be against Vienna, on the 16th, where Antonio Conte will hold his first official press conference.
It was most likely just a basic training session today—improving the player’s fitness, etc. With nothing on the club’s website, one would assume that Conte did not lead that training session, as he had a relatively small group of players to work with and probably focused on different areas like briefly getting to know the players, introducing himself to everybody at the club and discussing backroom appointments.
According to the Sun, Conte will run through multiple tactical sessions with his Chelsea players in the afternoon, where the squad would run grueling distances and a ball would only be introduced to the fold when they were tired. This type of training will occur twice a day through to our Premier League opener against West Ham on the 15th of August.
It’s not track-and-run, it’s football, and it’s hard to see how many players will buy into these type of training regimes, but this will be an incredibly effective way for Chelsea to build fitness and stamina.
