Hayden, the Footballer

UPDATE: He´s back

15/09/2013
After playing 7 trial games in 2.5 weeks and after a change of clubs, Hayden played his first official game uninjured in over 12 months and in a new position. After 3 seasons playing right lateral fullback, Hayden has decided he wants to move up the field where his speed and fast footwork may help him score some goals. So a new learning curve begins. His fitness is beginning to return and his speed is coming back too. He created the only 2 real scoring opportunities for his team in today’s game and drew 4 fouls in what was a reasonable beginning to his new position.
 
01/09/2013
Hayden played his 5th game in 10 days today and today´s game was in 40 degree heat. While his 50/50 ball wins were outstanding, his effective use of the football was not nearly as good as it usually is. Very hot and tiring conditions meant that he really felt his lack of fitness today so we are going to take steps to improve it more rapidly with some morning cross training sessions.
 
30/08/2013
Another trial game down and Hayden is getting more confident in his injury as he begins to add the running game back into his football. Again Hayden’s physicality frustrated his opponent who after only 20 minutes was asking his coach what to do because he could not get around Hayden. Hayden still needs to work alot on his fitness but his strength was very evident in this game and he clocked over 30km/h which is the fastest he has run in over 12 months and is only 1.5km/h under his PB. His football timing is still a little out and some of his touches were a little off but he did some really good things and he shut down virtually every attack down the right side. It is beginning to all come back to him and with another 3 tough games in the next week, it is exactly what he needs.
 
28/08/2013
Hayden completes another 45 minutes in a trial game. This time against slightly more physical opposition. We are still pleased with his progress and his fitness is continuing to improve. He was statistically the best player in that half of football, with 86% effective ball use, 3 ball wins and no ball losses and winning 2 fouls. 
 
26/08/2013
Hayden has completed 3 weeks of training and all is good. He has also now played two 45 minute halves of football in two separate games. While we know his speed and strength is a little less than before the injury, he is still moving quite well. The thing we are most pleased with is that he is reading the game particularly well and his passing precision is excellent. He needs to build some game fitness before he adds his penetrating attacking runs. Below are some highlights from his most recent game.
Apologies for the video not tracking Hayden very well but it is the cameraman´s (Hayden´s father) first game back after a spell too.
 
14/08/2013
Hayden has started his club training and while he has been a little selective with his training sessions to ensure he does not get injured again, he has completed all but two sessions with last night’s session being particularly physical. Hayden completed the entire session and looked good. He looks like he is gradually getting his speed and fitness back.
 
26/07/2013
After a month of solid training Hayden has one more week before he begins club training with Huracan Valencia. At this Friday’s training he pushed a little in his 40m sprint and managed a 5.59s (hand timed). While he seems to have kept alot of his speed, there is some work to do to re-claim the electric speed he had before his injury
 
Run throughs done on the 26/07/2013 – 5.59s. Hayden worked solidly for this time today.

Hayden and his friend and training partner Javier doing run throughs. They were not running side by side by side, their run throughs have been edited so we can see them together. Both players were told not to run at 100%.

05/07/2013
Hayden is back. After only 2 games played in the 2012/13 season due to a groin injury, we withdrew him from all football in December 2012 to allow his injury to heal. He had 4 months of absolutely rest followed by the last two months of rehabilitation and today he managed 6 x 40m run throughs at 6 second pace without any strange feelings of pain or anything, along with an hour of football technical training. This is a fantastic sign and we will progress him nice and steadily from here. In today’s session he did nearly 3.0km and 123 metres at high intensity so it was a fantastic session with him overcoming a big hurdle in his rehabilitation.
 
Here Hayden is playing around in the gym between gym exercises. Nice stability on the wobble board. Nice headphones, not!
 
Just easy training drills on a light training day.

Below is a video of one of the run throughs. As you can see he is on a dirt surface and wearing football boots and doing only a solid run to complete the 40m in 6.04s. The 40m is measured with a measuring wheel so we know it is 40m to the centimetre. You can use the time on the video to see it is a 6.04s run and you can tell he is not pushing too hard because he does not explode out at the start, he is not driving his arms fully and he slows for the last 10m and especially the last 5m. The reason he is not pushing is because we still need to be careful and progress his intensity steadily.
 
Hayden felt like he was running at 70-80% which is a great sign that he still has most of his speed after a 6 month lay off.  This suggests at full pace he will run under 5.0s for the 40m. We will have to wait and see if that is correct.

Bring on the 2013/14 season!

Run throughs done on the 05/07/2013 – 6.04s
 
Run throughs done on the 12/07/2013 – 5.88s. These run throughs are on a different surface so we had to be careful but Hayden was cruising at 5.88s for these.