IN the first of a two-part interview with Bolton News chief football writer Marc Iles, Wanderers’ new head of sports development Mark Leather talks about his return to the club

 

NOTHING will be left to chance in Wanderers’ promotion push next season if the man selected to head up their new sports science division has his way.

The devil is in the detail for new head of sports development Mark Leather, whose aim in the next few months is to restore the modern approach to performance analysis, rehabilitation and training for which the club has been so famed in the past.

Had it not been for a crippling list of injuries in the last few years, then you wonder just what the Whites could have achieved.

Long lay-offs for the likes of Stuart Holden, Chung-Yong Lee and Mark Davies have hit hard, while others like Keith Andrews, Matt Mills and David Wheater have encountered other fitness problems just as they thought they were on the road to recovery.

Those setbacks have been a constant source of frustration to the average Wanderers fan, but perhaps more so for a season ticket holder with 30 years of physiotherapy behind him like Leather.

While he has arrived to make significant changes, Leather is reluctant to point fingers or criticise previous regimes who have taken a different approach to sports science.

He aims to do things his way – which happily marries well with the forward-thinking Dougie Freedman, who has brought him back to the club this summer.

And he hopes a fresh approach can eliminate some of the “hard luck stories” that have dogged the club in recent years and kept key players sidelined for longer than they should have been.

“There is no degree of criticism in what I am saying here, but you can be unlucky to a certain degree and for a period of time. But for it to happen consistently, then maybe you need to look at that,” Leather told The Bolton News.

“It’s like a drip effect. If you take your foot off the gas then slowly but surely something has got to break down. It is not something that happens overnight but it happens over a period of time.

“If an athlete is not given access to the right treatment then they will break down. Then when they come back, they will break down with something else.

“It can happen for a lot of reasons but I think we need to quickly eradicate this sort of preventable scenario.”

Leather points out the example of Korean winger Chung-Yong, who fractured his leg in two places during a pre-season friendly with Newport in August 2011 and returned briefly in May the next year as the club slipped out of the Premier League.

Form and fitness was a problem for the former FC Seoul star throughout last season – and that, claims the Reebok’s new medical chief, could have been down to the way his rehabilitation was handled.

“Chung-Yong Lee’s fracture was a case in point,” he said. “You look at how he came back from that and the decisions that were made.

“Did he look right? Was he the player he was before the injury? As a supporter, I would have to say he didn’t for a while. It was only in the last couple of months that he started to show a bit more, and get a bit more confidence.”

Freedman quickly brought a more modern approach to the training ground after his arrival from Crystal Palace last October but has waited until this summer to reshuffle his backroom.

Pre-season for the players is likely to be very different than the one they went through 12 months ago with Owen Coyle and will include a high-tech fitness camp in La Manga, Spain.

At Euxton, the cobwebs have been blown off a lot of the gadgets and machinery that were championed the last time Leather worked at the club under Sam Allardyce.

But the man himself insists the new way of thinking is not “smoke and mirrors” and actually boils down to a fairly simple ethos.

“I’m not someone who is going to uproot and make changes just for change sake,” he said. “This isn’t about doing everything modern and forgetting the principles of why we are here in the first place.

“We want players out there performing for as long as they can, and training as well as they can, then it is down to the manager to pick which 11 goes out there on a Saturday afternoon.

“It is not to say what happened before was good, bad or indifferent. We are looking at this our way, and thankfully we have the backing of the manager who has a lot of similar ideas.

“We’re still using a lot of the old principles – we’re still going to be dealing with injuries, doing rehab, making sure people come into work with a smile on their face. We want all our staff to be enjoying our work.

“And the same goes for the players. We want to explain what we are doing with them. This isn’t about being dictatorial. They are more compliant if they know what they are doing and why they are doing it.”

l Read the second part of Leather’s interview with The Bolton News tomorrow, in which he explains some of the changes he will make this summer and why rugby union and rugby league has provided a template for his new department.