Swindon Town: 2011 / 2012 Pre Season

Hello Everyone and welcome back to the next installment of my Swindon Town story. We left off last time with Swindon winning the play off final and being promoted to the Barclays Premier League.

Following our momentous victory over Crystal Palace we all took a well earned break for a couple of weeks. My Assistant Manager Peter Shirtliff and I had our eyes on some players whose contracts were expiring for our venture into the Premier League but we knew we couldn’t approach anyone due to the boards’ salary restrictions. Peter had also terminated our ties with some minor West Country clubs so as to avoid unnecessary obligations for pre-season warm up games. Arsenal though terminated their link with us too.

The news came through at the end of June that we had received a whopping £29,000,000 windfall from TV Rights at that the board was handing over £11,500,000 for transfers! We could hardly believe it as not too long ago we only had £100,000 for transfers. I also told the board that my goal was to avoid relegation and keep Swindon in the Premier League.

My plan for the pre-season had always been to sign players as early as possible in order to give time for the team to gel and in case I wanted to change my tactics. The end of June turned out to be a very frustrating time with the words “rejected” and “no intention of” being heard down the phone almost every day. £11,500,000 to spend and no one of any quality will come to Wiltshire. Okay, so it is full of ancient stone monuments, druids and funny carvings on hillsides but it’s not all that bad…surely?

With the hope of any free signings all but gone we finally got a  breakthrough with the transfer budget and the first to sign was John Fleck from Rangers for £4.2 million. Although the board didn’t seem too pleased with the price I felt at 19 years old he had a lot to offer and hopefully would answer some of our goal scoring questions. Slimane Sissoko who was on loan with us last season also became a full time Swindon player from Stade Rennais. He’s very a useful rotation forward. Also Tomasz Sokolowski a DMC joined from Anderlecht, filled one of our targeted areas for improvement. Manuel Da Costa and Ben Amos completed the day one signings and so I felt we were finally making some progess By then end of the first week of July Liam Ridgewell, Darron Gibson and Victor Palsson had also joined the ranks so all was going to plan with getting players in early. Our first pre-season game was against Dagenham on July 13^th so that gave plenty of time for the squad to work together.

Transfers: The Ins and Outs of it….

Key signings:

John Fleck

Tomasz Sokolowski

Liam Ridgewell

The pre-season results went surprisingly well with only one defeat which happened on our mini tour of Holland though for that game our very rusty back ups made the starting eleven. I was very pleased with the result against Arsenal having been 2-0 up against a full strength Gunners but we succumbed to their relentless pressure. We ended pre-season with a nice result over Yeovil and finally Fleck got on the scoreboard. I’d been playing him in the AML slot but with inside forward instructions but decided to move him to a strikers position against Yeovil which had an immediate impact allowing him to bag two first half goals. I’m not sure now if I’ll go in search for another winger and change my starting front two as Fleck played so much better?.

Pre-Season Results:

During our trip to Holland we also found out how the bookies rated us for wining the title. not much chance at all it seems so we could be in for a very long season.

Up next then is our first Premier League game which is away to Everton who won the Coca Cola Championship and then at home to Manchester United. Not an ideal start but we’ll have to live with it.