ELITE performance manager Dave Misson says Melbourne’s four new players – Christian Petracca, Angus Brayshaw, Alex Neal-Bullen and Oscar McDonald – will be slowly integrated into the main pre-season training sessions.
Misson said the quartet experienced some of the main drills on Monday, but he didn’t want to throw them straight into the deep end.
“It’ll be information overload for those guys today I reckon. We gave them a little bit of a taste out there this morning about what to expect and they handled it pretty well,” he told Dee TV.
“They’re all in different stages in fitness and strength development, so we’ll assess that over the next week or two weeks, and make sure we graduate them progressively into the main program.
“The good thing is that none of them have any major issues at the moment, so we’ll just need to tread reasonably carefully with them until we can get them in to the main group, without breaking them down.”
With Melbourne set to finalise its 2015 list on Wednesday, via the NAB AFL Rookie Draft, Misson said he was looking forward to have a full squad to work with.
“That’ll be the full complement of the list then and that’s good. Once the rookie draft’s over – you know which players you’ve got and you’ve got your whole group together,” he said.
“We’re looking forward to getting them on board on Wednesday and rounding off the next two and a half weeks until we break up for Christmas.”
Misson said the players would also be working hard over the Christmas/New Year break.
“They’ve got a pretty structured program for the whole two weeks,” he said.
“Then when we come back we’re here for another week and we do another three-km [time-trial] after Christmas and then we go to Maroochydore.
“We’re looking forward to heading north and getting into the heat and we’ll really ramp up the footy sessions once we’re up north and get ready for pre-season games.”
More recently, the Demons completed another three-km time-trial last Friday and Misson said the efforts were encouraging.
“The results were good and the most pleasing thing was that some of the guys, who are towards the backend of benchmark running, were pushing into the times that we’d like to see from them,” he said.
“We’ve always had a pretty good top end group, but we’re getting some decent depth now.”
Overall, Misson said Melbourne’s second pre-season under coach Paul Roos was tracking strongly.
“It’s going pretty good. We’re happy with where the group’s at,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of guys who are in full training, so we’ve got a good core group that is doing everything and we’re getting some good skills into them and some blocks of running into them.
“We’re pretty pleased with where it’s at, at the moment.”
