Butterflies, sweaty palms and twitchy muscles. These are the all too familiar feelings I experience as a player lining up in the tunnel before the first match of the season. It doesn’t matter if it is your first season or you’ve played over 500 league games, the emotions don’t disappear on opening day!

Fans also experience nervousness, as well as the players. In the Premier League hundreds of thousands of loyal supporters have been waiting all summer for the big kick off. So it is a great shame that one top flight game to date has been postponed due to the riots sweeping across the nation. A terrible shame for clubs, players and fans!

Like many people I find it difficult to understand a motive or a reason for these horrific scenes. There is no excuse for what is happening and my heart goes out to the emergency services risking their lives to keep law and order.

It seems a very long time ago that my team mates and I were boarding a plane for our pre-season training camp. The trip was a great success and the fitness levels of our squad are now greater due to the hot weather and gruelling training sessions. 20 young(ish) football players living together for 5 days of course does not come without incident! A player returned with what can only be described as a ‘patchy’ haircut, sunburn was rife with the sun shy among us and the fines kitty was severely boosted with tales of misdemeanours and broken rules! (This is not a gossip column, that’s all you’re getting!) On a serious note, the training and 1 game we played abroad was a huge success and will stand us in good stead for the tough encounters facing us over the first month of the season.

With all the banter in the dressing room it is important that we have a very tight knit squad at Hereford and all the lads get on well. This is quite rare in my experience. I have been at bigger clubs where older pros don’t talk to younger players and small groups divide the squad.

On the team bus we have our own seats that we sit in religiously for away trips. It’s always entertaining to see where a new signing gets uprooted to after accidently sitting in another players’ seat. Funny how this didn’t happen to our new signing Delroy Facey! We all thought it would be in everyone’s’ best interests to let him sit where he wanted!

The away journeys in league 2 can be long and tedious so we always make full use of the DVD player on the bus! The flavour of the month at the moment is mainly films with Woody Harrelson in. Due to the fact that our coach Richard Sneekes bears an uncanny resemblance to him! Next month will be Home Alone films. (I’ll let you guess the staff member who looks like Macaulay Culkin.) On a final note, as I write this we are yet to see who we face in the Carling Cup 2nd round draw. It was a great performance to defeat league 1 side Brentford on Tuesday night and I am very pleased for Yohan aka ‘Yo’ on his first goal in English football. He has looked sharp in training and could be a real threat for us this season.