I FEEL as if there is a clamp on the outside of my left calf, I feel like there are needles going into my hamstrings when I reach to tie my shoes, and my abdomen hurts from too many sit-ups. Yep, pre-season.

These pains will hopefully soon fade and be replaced by fitness, or at least what passes for an imitation of fitness in amateur football.

While the A-League circus is rolling into the big-top of the Telstra Dome this weekend for the Grand Final, Ricki Herbert and Tony Pignata are preparing for a scouting trip to Europe and hopefully, making plans for the pre-season.

The pre-season is at least as important as any other crucial part of the season and last year I think we kinda, sorta, maybe, definitely screwed it up 60% of the time all the time.

The way I see it, we hit two peaks this season, one during the Pre-Season Cup and one towards the end of the season. We did become one of the better sides in the competition, but not as good as the sides who had paced their seasons better. Most specifically, Melbourne.

Early in the season, when the team and fans were at their lowest ebb, I wondered if something went wrong with the training programme, had they trained the players too hard?

After thinking back, I've come to the conclusion that it was entirely mental - we took the PSC too seriously. In fact, in the final we couldn't even break down a Melbourne side that was possibly the only other club that even cared about the competition.

Yet fans and pundits alike thought we were in for a successful season; just the wise sages in the Yellow Fever ranks piped up, "the other clubs aren't taking this seriously, just wait and see", only to be ignored by their fellow fans, and any players who may have been reading the forums.

For sure we played good football in the pre-season, it was the football RH wanted to play, it was the football the fans wanted to see, and coming out of the PSC we thought it would be top four football.

Perhaps it would have been, but our focus on that one particular style and our success using it meant that when it came to the crunch, playing against Melbourne in torrential rain, we continued to pass the ball along the ground and refused to adapt like Victory did, thus we were on the end of a 4-2 drubbing. The next week no one really turned up at Hindmarsh, and suddenly we were starting from scratch again.

This is a big lesson and I hope the club took note and will learn from it. We all want to see attractive, winning football, but pre-season should be a time to look at many possibilities, especially game-plans for our rather soggy springtime, when a ball passed along the ground won't go very far. 

I'd also personally rather we didn't take the PSC too seriously and peaked at the right time, rather than this season's Mt Ruapehu and Mt Cook, compared to Melbourne's Everest.

James Malthus is a nominee for Yellow Fever fan of the year, under the tag 'Blogger to the Stars'