EXECUTIVE BRIEF: Revolving door at County Ground, but Paolo’s plans in place (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

EXECUTIVE BRIEF: Revolving door at County Ground, but Paolo’s plans in place

3:00pm Friday 6th July 2012 in Sport

THE ARRIVAL lounge at the County Ground has been quite busy over the last few weeks and so has the departure lounge.

We’ve brought in seven new faces and they’ve all got the experience of playing at a higher level necessary to succeed at this level.

Paolo Di Canio now has the benefit of having studied the players in the League One and League Two for 12 months and if you think back to a year ago, we had a steady stream of names arriving that perhaps didn’t roll off the tongue so easily – names like Lander Gabilondo, Ibrahim Atiku and Alberto Comazzi.

We had to work quickly to move for the new players before other clubs stole them away but we’re delighted with the signings that we’ve made.

One thing that Paolo was also keen to do was make sure that he had the majority of his squad together for the per-season boot camp at Lake Garda.

At the same time, he also didn’t want to take players who weren’t part of his plans for next season too and he’s made it public that he would welcome interest in Jonathan Smith, Alan Connell and Lee Cox - they’ve stayed home and are training hard at the County Ground.

Our stadium and operations manager Mark Isaacs drove to Italy with all the training kit for the camp, along with our media manager Chris Tanner, who’s stayed out there.

Chairman Jeremy Wray may also be heading out there for a few days to touch base with Paolo.

There’s a steady conduit of communication between us back in Swindon and the camp, which makes it easy for us to sort out things like the sale of Billy Bodin to Torquay.

There may be no footballs being kicked but there’s definitely no rest and there’s a lot to take care of in preparation for the new season.

There’s painting and decorating around the County Ground, restoration work on the Pavilion and work on the training ground to be done.

We’ve got our head of design Derrick Johnson working on the new programmes and we’re also waiting for all of the new kit to come in.

Mr Di Canio likes to have everything ready to go at the ground so that he can just slip back in to his tailor-made suit and get going.