There’s no doubt that this coming season is a critical one for Newcastle United and it not be easy as we fight to get back to the Premier League for the second time in a short seven years.
With Rafa Benitez as manager there has been lots of stuff accomplished in the short five weeks Rafa has been the permanent manager at the club.
Those include making temporary changes to the Benton Training ground and already getting three new players in.
Rafa Benitez and his coaching staff
We say temporary because Rafa talked over the weekend about the new plans to make Benton into a world-class training facility at a cost of around £25M – but there was not time to do that over the summer.
So Rafa did the next best thing – and made changes to the existing facilities he thought necessary for this important season coming up.
With the Championship season ending early on May 7th, there should be extra time next summer to get the Training Center plans that were developed and announced back in November 2013 finally implemented.
Artist’s impression of new Training Facility
We’re sure Rafa has already talked about that as one of the longer term enhancement items for the club.
The manager will start double training sessions this week and the squad will be in Ireland next week for a training, fitness and bonding camp.
It’s a short four weeks come Friday until we start the Championship season at Fulham on a Friday night – 5th August.
Here’s the pre-season schedule that has been put in place that leads up to that game.
[table “52” not found /]So far so good with some very real progress already made under the guidance of the new manager – and things seem different.
Things seem a lot better than in previous seasons when you have somebody who knows exactly what he’s doing now in charge of the club.
Next year at this time we hope we are preparing for the Premier League in new world-class facilities – that’s part of Rafa’s overall plan for the club.
Comments welcome.
3 comments so far
G
Jul 4, 2016 at 10:00 AM
Comment #1I have a good feeling this season, for the first time in a long time I feel confident we are about to see something special start to happen.
martoon
Jul 4, 2016 at 10:13 AM
Comment #2I’ve said it before but in a perverse way I’m looking forward to playing in the Championship. We get to play different teams, there are more games and hopefully we’ll win the majority of them! 🙂
SuperShearer
Jul 4, 2016 at 10:14 AM
Comment #3Sky are linking Will Hughes with Manchester United. Can’t help but think that for the estimated £7 Million we should be in for him. He’s young, coming back from injury and with a manager like Rafa could take the next step up. Arguably more so than if he was benched for ages under Jose.