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Raise Your Game: How important is it to have some sort of regime?

Chris Coleman: It plays a massive part, plus it's all about the planning. There's a famous saying that 'If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail,' and that's very true. You have to do a lot of planning, certainly in football.

We watch the opposition three or four times before we play them. The week building up to the game we work on many different things on how we could maybe hurt them and how they could hurt us.

The players' training schedule is very, very strict, but because they're playing at such a high level it has to be like that. And you have to do all that planning and a lot of preparation, but if you want to succeed in anything you have to do all your preparation.

I think a lot of guys who want to be professional football players they see the Premiership players and they see the finished article, but there's a lot of hard work that's gone into their careers for them to get there. There's a lot of sacrifice and I think people tend to forget that.

RYG: Can you give us a small insight into the training regime and the changes you made when you took over as manager of Fulham?

CC: The manager before me, Jean Tigana, his training regime was very good, very scientific. I learnt a lot from that regime, and I kept a lot. Of course I had my own ideas, we had our own style of playing and we played different formations than we were used to.

For me the training has to be a mixture of hard work, it has to have a good structure, a good base, but also I don't want all my players to be like machines. Because football is an emotional game, it's full of feeling and that's why we try to train with a smile on our face. At the same time we work very hard, but it's a fine line and you've got to try and get that balance right if you can.

I've got different training methods probably to anybody else because we're all different, but for me the atmosphere on the training pitch and on the training ground is very, very important.