LL Fitness Demands

By: Bill Osborne
Date: 16/05/2001

Lennie Lawrence made his feelings clear about the fitness of players when he said, "You've got to be available and if you can't play 35 or 40 games in a squad of sixteen every Saturday, quite frankly you are a waste of time.

If you're 19, 20 or 21 and you are learning it, that's a different story. Too many didn't last season, and that wont happen next year."

In a tough talk to the Official Site he said "My first impressions when I came to the club was that there were some good professionals here, it was a nice little club, but it was stuck. Not too much was happening, and a lot of things needed changing. That's what we've endeavoured to do. We brought all those loan players in, and between them they scored 16 goals without which we'd have struggled."

"The injury situation has worried me from the start to the finish, quite frankly, too many players have missed too much time. Luckily for us some of the key players like Danny Coyne, Grovesie and Donovan stayed largely injury-free. Other players had too many injuries - that's why we needed those loan players."

"You are never going to have as big a squad, and you're certainly not going to have the quality of squad as other teams in this division have got. If you are a senior player at Grimsby Town, as far as I'm concerned, you've got to play 40 games. Unless you are particularly unlucky with an injury that rules you out for a long time, if you don't play then, you are a waste of time to be quite brutal about it."

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