Derry City players will be ready once League of Ireland resumes: Declan Devine

The City boss has been using his time in lockdown to reflect and analyse Derry’s opening four league fixtures and he’s been keeping in touch with his playing staff regularly and putting them through their paces from afar.

And he’s confident, when football eventually resumes, fitness won’t be a problem for his players.

“We know the final date (June 19th) we have to start back, it might not start in June but at the same time we’ve got to prepare like it will,” said Devine.

“We’ve been recording all the players’ data,” he explained “Data from their heart rate monitors are being sent through to us and their programmes are being sent out on a weekly basis.

“Everybody is being above board and they’ve all got to make sure that when they come back they’re ready to compete at the top end again.”

Dr Malachy O’Neill, Provost of Magee Campus of Ulster University has kindly loaned the club five spin bikes to help some of the City players to keep fit whilst staying at home while they will all have gym equipment available to them.

“I’ve been touching base with the players. They’ve taken all the gym stuff with them so they’re all well equipped.

“Nowadays players don’t stop anyway, they want to train and they want to train hard. When we get back, fitness won’t be a problem. They’re all training hard. Training is one way to get out of the house as well and have a bit of freedom.

“They’re feeding into the fitness guys every day and hitting their targets. I’m also in touch with them all regularly to see how things are getting on.

“It’s been good to touch base and see where they were, just a case of following their programmes, everybody will be chomping at the bit to get back.”

It’s been five weeks of lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic and the current, unprecedented hiatus has given Devine some food for thought.

Indeed, the City boss has come to realise how ‘fortunate’ he is to be involved in football and he can’t wait to get back to normality.

“I’ve been watching past games and all the games from the start of the season so it’s given me a bit of time to catch up on that,” he explained.

“We want to make sure we learn from this and how lucky and fortunate we are to be in a position we’re in because there’s so much doom and gloom at the moment and whenever you get an opportunity to be a professional footballer you have to make sure when we get back into the nitty gritty of it we’re ready to go.

“It has just shown us how lucky we are to be involved in professional football. That is the one thing sticking out in my mind, you can’t take it for granted that we’re doing something we love every single day. It’s just taken away from you.

“It’s my first time not working in the last 15 or 16 years. It’s hard to take in. It’s incredible when you sit back and assess what we are doing, we are very, very fortunate to be involved in football and that’s what I’ll take out of it when we get back. Even the daily meetings and the planning out of sessions, it seems so long ago that we did that. It’s incredible.

“When we do come back, I’ll certainly be coming in with a fresher mind of how fortunate we are to do something we really love.”

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