With the arrival of new head coach/manager Thomas Christiansen at Elland Road, there was bound to be change. That proved to be the case.
Out went the old guard of assistant Pep Clotet, first team coach James Beattie and goalkeeping coach Darryl Flahavan. It was inevitable that they would be replaced by those close to the incoming new guy Christiansen.
With the old guard leaving, it was all about the new brooms coming in to sweep clean. Julio Banuelos became Thomas Christiansen’s assistant, Ivan Torres became the new fitness coach at Elland Road and Marcos Abad was installed as the new goalkeeping coach.
Abad, who has never played the game professionally, sees the move as one imbued with great honour, saying as much on his personal website. Saying that a “new illusion” had been awakened, Abad went on to say that he considers his appointment an “opportunity to continue growing with a spectacular club.”
What might Marcos Abad have in store for the keepers at Leeds United?
Above, is a look at some of his training methods at Elche, who currently play in Spanish football’s La Segunda División. If this is anything to go by, there will be more than enough to keep Leeds’ keepers like Rob Green, Marco Silvestri and Bailey Peacock-Farrell busy.
Abad says [1:04] that the goalkeepers “arrive in the morning where the idea is to plan physical conditioning work specifically for goalkeepers.”
He then goes on to say [1:33] that another exercise is to focus on the “job of stabilization of power imbalances…and that allows us to reach the optimum stimuli for the completion you focus on.”
The gym work on specific exercises obviously goes hand-in-hand with how this translates into on-field work and preparing goalkeepers for game situations. He mentions this [2:50-3:00] saying: “We try to customise different parameters within the [training] environment. The difficulty is [as] variable as we can find in competition, and above all those situations that they see that occur in games.”
Whilst this was a training session from 2015, it would be safe to assume that the rationale behind the methods that he had then will guide his hand at Elland Road.
