Hogg sets out the plan for Northampton's week at St George's Park
Chris Hogg believes this week’s trip to St George’s Park – home of the England national side – will be beneficial for his players both on and off the pitch.
Town’s squad will spend several days at St George’s Park, an elite level performance facility renowned for its coaching, sports science and medical expertise, giving Hogg the ideal environment to ramp up preparations for the new season.
"The facilities are obviously top class,” said Hogg speaking after Saturday's friendly against Leicester. “The boys will have a day off tomorrow (Sunday) and then we'll go to St George's Park on Monday morning and we'll have four-day block of work.
"There'll be double sessions, hard work, running, ball work, some social stuff. We'll run competitions all week to make it competitive and it'll be good to see the boys in a different environment. I'll learn more about who they are and they'll learn more about me and it'll also be good to spend time with the staff to get to know them as people.
"There'll be a lot of hard work and it'll be another step on from what we've done so far. There will probably be more on our in-possession stuff and trying to get better in that respect.”
Asked what competitions they’ll be running, Hogg explained: “I’ve put pressure on Joe Power (strength and conditioning coach) to give the lads a heads up because there’ll be little questions during warm-ups and points for teams.
"We’ll have certain competitions where points go into a total for the week and there’ll be forfeits and an overall winner at the end of the week. The boys don’t actually know about it yet.
"There’ll be a few prizes as well because I don’t like to do something for the sake of it. I want people to have a winning mindset. Everything we do has to be about winning and being as good as we can. We want to build that mentality and hopefully this week will help that.”