With just two weeks left of the season for me, this week turned out to be a very good one. After playing well as a team but losing to Man City on Saturday, we had a double days training on Monday morning – it was just us that were in because the reserves and first team had the day off.

This week was one of frustration, but I know now that every week can’t always go perfectly in football. To start with on Monday I was hoping that I may start for the reserves against Sheffield Wednesday after not playing at the weekend for the youth team.

This week was by far one of the most enjoyable weeks for me at Nottingham Forest. On Monday I reported for training at 8.30 like usual and cleaned the first team boots before heading to education. We’ve almost finished our education programme so I got a bit of work done to edge nearer to completing my course.

This week was a mixed sort of week with highs and lows. To start off I didn’t train on Monday morning because I had to attend a funeral.

This week started off in frustrating fashion but finished fairly well. On Monday I reported for physio on my ankle that I’d gone over on during Saturday’s game. Monday and Tuesday consisted of treatment from the Academy physio and ice baths because I couldn’t do any exercise on it or else it’d just swell up.

After losing to Middlesbrough 5 – 0 in what was our worst performance of the season, we had a chance to put things right on Tuesday with a re-arranged away game against Sheffield Wednesday.

Mother Nature had the biggest say on what training was like this week. Like most parts of the nation, Nottingham was victim to very heavy snow and this meant that training wasn’t possible outdoors for us throughout most of the week.

This week was potentially a very good week, but proved to be a very disappointing one. To begin with on Monday we had a double day but I still felt pretty rough from the past few days and my chest was still heavy.

This week was an eventful week to say the least, full of ups and downs! To start with I was still injured from the game against Middlesbrough and it meant I had to come in on Sunday to do some extra training and try jogging with the physio. Sunday’s are still not the best days for me because I’m always half asleep more so than other days.

With us playing Cardiff on the Friday, it meant we had Saturday off which was a nice change. I watched Soccer AM in the morning which is something I don’t generally get chance to do with me playing on Saturday mornings usually. It was a real joke as normal, banter is always flying on that programme.

We returned back to training in the New Year on the 5th of January. We had broken up on the 19th of December, which meant we had a two week break from the football and in a way it was nice to have that off because you get to re-energise yourself and have a rest to get back and work hard for the remainder of the year which is important.

This week was a bit different because we had a mid-week game. We started off the week by training on Sunday, a day earlier than usual because normally we have a game on a Saturday and have Sunday off, but because we had a game on the Friday it meant we had Saturday off and then training on Sunday – hopefully you got that!

For the start of this week it was like any normal week…double day Monday, double day Tuesday, education Wednesday, but a single session on Thursday because we were playing Portsmouth on Friday.

At the start of the week I was still a bit frustrated from losing the game at the weekend to Huddersfield, but I wanted to train hard this week to try and make amends this weekend against Sheffield Wednesday.

We won convincingly at the weekend and even though there were areas we can still work on the week was pretty straight forward and consisted of quite a lot of football fitness.

On Tuesday we had a fairly long day of training – normally Monday and Tuesday are the longest training sessions during our normal week. In the morning we had our gym session at 8 o’clock like usual, with it being first thing in the morning most of us lads are still half asleep.

On Monday it was our first day back from our four day break, so obviously we needed to make sure we had done some work over the time off just to keep ourselves ticking over. The four days were a way to sort of refresh ourselves because since July we’ve hit training pretty hard and haven’t had a real break as such so we had time off to rest and refresh ourselves and get ready to work hard until Christmas.

On Tuesday we had another day which most of the lads hate… ‘the long one’. This is when we’re in the gym at 8.00am and then have morning and afternoon sessions before watching the first team play at home at night. I normally get home just after 10pm and it’s a very long day to say the least, but it does seem to go quite quickly.

I started off on Monday by checking out my weight to see how much I had lost during the past week. I weighed in at 151 pounds and I normally weigh 157; I had lost six pounds which is around half a stone!

After turning 18 on the 3rd of October, things went downhill for me. My birthday was on a Friday and I found out that day that I wouldn’t be starting against Sunderland on the Saturday because one of the third years was playing down and so consequently I lost my starting place.

After looking fit throughout most of the game on Saturday, it was important that we kept our fitness up, so on Monday we started off by doing two timed perimeter runs. This consists of running around the whole of the academy site at a good high pace. We did a warm-up lap first, had a few stretches and then set out for the two runs.

Match: Nottingham Forest v Mansfield Town (friendly)

On Tuesday we had a friendly against Mansfield, which for us was an opportunity to get the defeat on Saturday out of our systems and get a win under our belts. I started off playing right midfield in a very offensive line up. We started the game a bit sloppy but then got on top of the game and started to pass the ball well.

At Nottingham Forest there is an annual Academy golf day in which people compete to raise money for the Academy and Coaches and players are allowed to take part as well. We teamed up in groups of 3 or 4 and there were about 4 teams made up of Academy members alone – so you can already guess that it was going to be very competitive!

Match: Nottingham Forest v Grimsby Town

After not playing on the previous Saturday, there was a mid-week U18’s game in which we played Grimsby Town. The game was to maintain our fitness and to try and get a full ninety minutes for some of us.