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Matt Doherty has nothing but love for Tottenham's renowned fitness coach Gian Piero Ventrone despite the brutal training sessions the Italian has been putting the players through.
Monday's open training session in front of 6,000 fans in Seoul during Spurs' South Korean tour gave a glimpse of exactly what takes place in Antonio Conte's gruelling pre-seasons. The players who had returned to the club first last week had to complete 42 pitch-long runs at pace with only brief pauses after each third run and all of that came after a near two-hour training session.
The international players who returned later had to complete 30 runs and that left Harry Kane throwing up by the side of the pitch after falling to the floor and needing a cold towel placed on the back of neck, while Son Heung-min also dropped down exhausted before both men, who only returned to training at the weekend, continued with their runs.
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Doherty, who came back earlier than most, as he looked to play catch-up following his knee injury that ended last season prematurely for him, has been among the fittest in the group and was able to complete the 42 runs. He made it very clear that the runs were not for show and are a regular feature of the pre-season training.
"Yeah, [they're] pretty normal. Even the week before in London was along those lines so I don’t know if there will be any teams fitter than us. It’s not like anything I’ve done before. This is hard. It’s the hardest pre-season I’ve had," he said. "You get a great satisfaction once the session is over. Your mind has been tortured in the middle of it but when it’s done you feel proud and you got to bed at night time thinking ‘yeah, I’ve worked hard today’."
He added: "During it you’re just thinking don’t quit. Even if you crawl over the line or you have to jog or walk towards the end. It’s that determination the manager has kind of instilled in us to keep going and never quit."
The experienced Ventrone has been putting players through their paces for years in Italy and across the world, including Conte when he was a player at Juventus, and many stars have had a love-hate relationship with the 62-year-old in the past. Doherty however says the Italian is a popular figure with him and the Spurs squad.
"It’s all love for Gian Piero actually. It’s funny because we were having this conversation. Normally when you have a fitness coach like that who is running you ragged you start to not like him but that’s not the case. We all absolutely love him," he said. "We’ve got so much respect for him that we do whatever he tells us to."
At Juventus Ventrone utilised a 'bell of shame' that the first player who dropped out of the endurance sessions would have to ring so everyone could see they had quit. Doherty said that the fitness coach must have mellowed in the decades since.
"There’s nothing like that [here]. I think he’s actually calmed down a lot in the last few years," he said. "We’re getting the sentimental side of him! Seriously though, it’s incredibly tough and they know what they’re doing so we trust them."
Conte is building a strong squad at Tottenham as he looks to aim for bigger things and the club are closing in on adding to their right wing-back ranks with Middlesbrough's Djed Spence expected to join in the coming days. Doherty though is looking to capitalise on any competition that has been created within the squad.
"There’s a lot of competition and that’s never a bad thing, it brings everybody’s standards up, makes everybody train properly, train hard and that’s what you want," he explained. "You want to earn your position on merit. You don’t want it handed to you. We’re all competitors and that’s what we want. We want to fight against each other and get a place."
On whether he expects to stay at the club this summer, he added: "Of course. I haven’t been told otherwise. My plan is to stay and fight for my place. We’ve got an exciting season ahead. Why would I want to go anywhere else?"
Doherty has been working hard on his recovery in recent months ahead of what he hopes will be a big season for him after kickstarting his Spurs career under Conte last time around.
"I was in for a lot of the summer because I had to rehab my knee. For the first two weeks when everybody left I was in doing rehab with weekends off, out on the pitch doing ball work and fitness work. I didn’t have a choice. I had to be in. I wanted to be back for pre-season ready to go," he said.
"I had a week away and then came in for a day. I had three weeks off in a row but I came in during the second week for a couple of days and in again during the third week for a couple of days. I made sure I was ready to go.
"You can only feel in so much good shape once you start all that running but I feel OK. I might need to give my knee a little bit of time, that’s normal. The more you train and the more reps you get it will go away. I can see that. Sometimes it will bother me and the longer the week goes it will ease off."
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