UFO Info Week-End

He has worked with footballers such as Steve Watson Lee Clark Les Ferdinand and Shaka

He has worked with footballers such as Steve Watson, Lee Clark, Les Ferdinand and Shaka Hislop, and in boxing helped coach Glenn McCrory to his world cruiserweight title. Any Welsh players who want to boast of their bench press maximums, do so out of earshot of Blackie, he may just embarrass you.His real passion is football, though, and for a brief spell he managed Blackpool Football Club. No one is better able to judge the mood in the camp and, more importantly, how to mould and shape it. He is able to do all this despite anything he may be struggling with himself. You hardly ever see him without a smile and a ready tale to tell And there are many of those.

You just have to look at his background to see why.On the sporting side alone his cv is extensive. He came into sports science just 10 years ago having himself had trials with Newcastle United at football, tried his hand at boxing and, more successfully, at power lifting. For this to work, you need to have a strong trust between the player and the trainer. Blackie relies a lot on the feedback from a player to judge what he can or cannot get out of him.

Many is the time that I have started a session insisting that I couldn’t do much that day to find myself bouncing around after a two-hour workout.As we see and train with Blackie pretty much every day, he is also able to perform the role of soundboard, nursemaid, gossip monger and general good mate. Do not expect to see bleep test results, bench press maximums and sprint times. Sports scientists may bemoan the lack of any results to monitor a player’s progress and state of fitness, but Blackie would argue that the best judge of that isn’t tests but the player himself. That being the case you can understand then that his influence must stretch to more than just the gym and Tynemouth beach training runs. Therein lies the man’s prowess and that’s what will benefit Wales.