Football with Mark Bridge

The 23-year-old, who spent four months this winter on loan to Chinese club Tianjin Teda, has thrived under Lavicka’s leadership.

Mark Bridge Sydney FC. Image: Warren Clarke

After last year’s A-League failure, Sydney FC took a different approach. Rather than outlaying for a creaking marquee player, they sought out a marquee coach instead. And so Vitezslav Lavicka, a 46-year-old Czech with a resume headed by stints at Sparta Prague and Slovan Liberec, headed south to the Harbour City. His no-nonsense, Eastern bloc mentality has promptly kiln-fired Sydney this season.Who better to dissect Lavicka’s training ground dictatorship than striker Mark Bridge? The 23-year-old, who spent four months this winter on loan to Chinese club Tianjin Teda, has thrived under Lavicka’s leadership. For evidence, look no further than the 26th minute of Sydney’s round seven clash with Newcastle. Bridge collected the ball 45m from the Jets’ goal, two defenders in front of him. He burnt the first on his outside shoulder, turned the second inside out, then cracked a right-foot drive that climbed and curled over the keeper’s head before dipping neatly into the top left corner. It was a sublime show of individual skill that must’ve widened the eyes of national manager Pim Verbeek.

The ladder is a great agility tool. Image: Warren Clarke

Getting started

“We do a V02 max test at the start of the season. It tells us where our heart rate’s at, its maximum and where it peaks. From then on, when we’re going to do a hard session, we wear heart rate watches at training. Our trainer wants us hitting 80 per cent of our max heart rate. That shows him we’re working. When we stop, the quicker that heart rate drops, the fitter we are. We’re aimingto get our heart rate up to 175 and we want to get it back to 120 in around a minute. That’s a realistic time; any shorter than that and you’d be massively fit. We normally have a quick drinks break after we’ve done a hard, small-sided game and by the time we’ve finished the break and walking back onto the field, our heart rate should be hitting that 120 mark. All the boys are around that atthe moment – we’re a pretty fit squad.”

Match Fit

“We have a very long pre-season – most of our aerobic work is done there. By the time we hit the season we’re not doing too much fitness stuff, we’re basically just ticking over. We play games, particularly small-sided games to maintain that match fitness. You know, matches are a lot different to training. If you’re training alone you don’t have that intensity – someone marking you, small changes of direction, start-stop sprints, longer 50m sprints to counter attack. There are so many different types of sprinting involved in a game situation.

“I think the best exercise you can do to get close to match fitness is fartlek running – jog for 20m, sprint 20, jog 20, sprint 40 and so on. But I definitely think the more matches you play in pre-season the easier it is when you come to the start of the season. I actually missed four months of this pre-season because I was playing in China, but I know the boys played lots of games – I think it was 13 or 14. That was a massive part of our pre-season this year. People talk about luck during the season, about things falling their way. I think the fitter you are, the luckier you get.”