ROVERS return to pre-season training tomorrow and it’s fair to say it wasn’t something that I enjoyed as a player, writes Simon Garner.

But it has moved on and nowadays players will have individual plans to work to and not simply be sent on long cross-country runs.

Certain managers when you turned up would just send you out on long-distance runs, but that has all changed now with the introduction of sports science and individual players given different programmes to work to.

The Rovers lads will have been under strict orders when they went on their summer break and even in my day you wouldn’t want to come back overweight, otherwise you would be fined.

Returning to pre-season was always on your mind, but it used to be about a week before we came back that I would start properly dieting, I would put it off for as long as possible.

But the game is so fast nowadays, and the schedule so intense, that you need to be up to speed from the minute you return to pre-season training. That is the hardest thing.

Under the managers I worked under at Rovers, Jim Smith’s pre-season was the toughest. He was one of my first managers and it was always really hard. The easiest was under Howard Kendall. Because he was new to management, and came in as a player-manager, he did nearly all of his pre-season with the football.

Howard, like me, didn’t like doing the running so we would do about 400m and that was enough.

But now it is not just down to the manager what happens in pre-season, a lot of that will be decided by the sports scientists and all compiled on a computer.

Corry Evans will return to pre-season with the rest of the squad having spent time working on his fitness during the summer after a long time out injured. Even in my day, if you had an injury then you would come in over the summer and work on your fitness.

Being injured is the worst thing in the world and you certainly don’t want to go in to pre-season with any sort of knock. All you want to do is play football.

With Corry, I am sure he would much rather have had one long spell out injured, get over that, and come back to full fitness because suffering with niggling injuries is a real test of someone’s character. It was pleasing to hear Rovers have made cash bids for players – but it’s long overdue.

They are not going to be massive bids, but as long as they get the right players in for that division then it will be money well spent.

It does help that Tony Mowbray has managed in the league before, with Coventry in 2015/16. He knows about what is needed in League One. You want to keep good footballers at the club but you also need workers in that division for the long winter away trips.