Diet is key for Ronny Deila as he seeks to shed body fat and speed up his players for a tilt at the Champions League Some of the steps on the path to enlightenment Ronny Deila is mapping out for his Celtic squad were this week explained by the club’s would-be guru, and one of his disciples, Mikael Lustig. We learned that fizzy drinks have been banned from the club’s training complex and that there have been significant changes to the menus for breakfast and lunch – with the latter now a mandatory meal. Reducing body fat has become a key component of a fitness regime wherein the club’s nutritionist, Pam Paul, is no longer a peripheral figure. Deila’s holistic approach to playing and personal development places as much store on mind as body. It is his mission to make those in his charge “conscious of everything they do, both on and off the field”, to give them the knowledge to make the right choices, and, in part through widespread use of video analysis, eventually have self-improvement wired to their main frame. Deila, who maintains his “group have been fantastic” in accepting the new regime – and, if anything, have been “over-working” and “over-thinking” in their desire to embrace change. “For players to meet the demands at this club, which is reaching the Champions League and performing in the Champions League, I am asking: do you want it or not? If players are not fit, the easiest element, and if I get sacked for that [making them fit], that is not my problem, it is the club’s problem. I know the club is with me, I know the players are with me. “The lunches we have are unbelievable, and if you don’t like the food you have a big problem. It is not me saying ‘this is not on’, it is the work Pam is doing. You have to educate and in the right way. I don’t say to them ‘you have to do it’. I can say ‘you have to drop your body fat and if you need help with that, talk to Pam’. “You talk to me about Champions League? OK, then we have to look like a Champions League team. We have to train like a Champions League team. And that means going at 100 per cent every day. We have to be fit. We look at the body fat. If you weigh two or three kilos too much? I want a quick team and you can’t be quick if you weigh too much. You need quick players in Europe. Look at [Cristiano] Ronaldo and [Gareth] Bale. That’s the standard we’re talking about. “After that it’s about communication with the players. It’s important after games that they get feedback on what they do, what they can improve. And then we start to process it so we can be better as a unit and also as individuals. It’s new for them.” In Deila suggesting that the “processes” he is seeking to put in place are new to the Celtic players, meanwhile, you can read implicit criticism of the Neil Lennon regime. Even if the Norwegian goes out of his way to avoid creating that impression. “It’s different styles,” he says. “If you are a leader, you have to lead as what kind of person you are. There are things you can adapt, but I have to be me. Neil is Neil and had fantastic success. And what they did was good because they had success. I do it differently in some things, because, if not, I’m not me.” Yet, let’s be frank here, Lennon, for all his wealth of compelling attributes, was hardly known for his monastic lifestyle. Imposing a strict health regime on others might have felt awkward for him. Indeed, Deila does acknowledge that, though “Pam has been here for three years, I maybe take in more than before”. The nutritionist accompanied the team on pre-season as part of a burgeoning support staff. In terms of eating at certain times, Deila demands more than before too. “You know, I can’t understand that they [the players] don’t have to eat lunch here because when you train, everybody knows that you have to get something in to recover. If you go straight home, or to a cafe in the city, it is too late. So for me, it is to be a professional. Also it is a social thing, to eat together. Then you have the different view that when you have too many hours here, you get tired of it. You have to prepare for a game. It is so hard to break this in the right way.” Lustig breaks it down into nationalistic tendencies. “How we can be better when we’re not playing, what we’re going to eat and so on, is more of a Scandinavian thing. We have to be professional outside of the pitch. Things have changed here, the way we eat. “To be fair it was Coke and Irn Bru for lunch for some lads. But it’s a different culture between Scandinavia and here in the UK. Here, you can eat pancake for breakfast or toast. We never do that in Scandinavia, it’s more healthy food. We eat fruit, porridge something like that for breakfast. Energy drinks and so on to drink.” “I don’t give a shit if they do mistakes, tomorrow, next weekend or the weekend after that and we lose, but if you are the same player in the autumn you were in the spring, then you have a problem and I have a problem. You have to learn from your mistakes. Learn from the good things because players who don’t want to get better are nothing to do with Celtic. “Everybody has to want to get better because this is a so huge club, so important. So I have to learn a lot, I have new experiences all the time, and have to adapt to them and take them into me. Tactics, the decisions of the team, how I prepare the training, how I get energy into the players and motivate them... there are 1000 questions I have to ask myself all the time and then I need time to get away and reflect. That’s the culture I want. I want my staff to take their own decisions and think, ‘what is best for the player’. If a player needs to be stronger and he doesn’t get it, it’s not only the player’s problem. It’s also the staff, because why else are they here? They have to take responsibility for their tasks.” -Maggie
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 08:41:38 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015