Usain Bolt low-key on second day of training with Central Coast Mariners
SO this edition of Bolt Watch is brought to you from a stepladder among the Lisarow trees. For the gates at Mariners HQ, they’re padlocked.
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SO this edition of Bolt Watch is brought to you from a stepladder among the Lisarow trees.
For the gates at Mariners HQ, they’re padlocked.
And have been this particular Wednesday morning since dawn.
A pair of club employees — or maybe they’re groundsmen, certainly one is decked out in work boots — ordered to play the role of security and only open for those Central Coast players who, one after another, are trickling into the compound for practice.
Any other day, these gates would be wide open and unmanned.
But not today.
BIG AMBITION: Bolt happy to be chasing his dream
INNOVATOR: Coach sees Bolt as a big plus for club
Which is problematic.
For right know all anyone wants to know — and, yes, football purists, we’re including you — is whether Usain Bolt can really play?
Sure, he’s done a little Six-On-Six back home in Jamaican with mates.
But c’mon.
If your buddy was worth $50 million, and the sole reason you’re gaining entry to all those luxury yachts, private jets and nightclub booths where the vodka bill alone has been known to top $17,000 … well, you’re hardly going to challenge him studs up, are you?
Yet the A-League, it’s no joke.
Which is why for Bolt, the jury remains out.
Remembering how already this year, the world’s fastest man has trialled unsuccessfully with teams in Germany and Norway. And then Tuesday for the cameras, did little but a glorified stretch.
Yet now with the Mariners locked down, and the real work surely set to begin, we’ve come to see what happens.
Does Bolt have touch? Finesse?
Can the big unit even play?
And so with those gates padlocked — and The Daily Telegraph’s photographer wanting to get his lens above razor wire topping the perimeter fence — we trudge a few blocks home, grab a stepladder from the garage, then return to spend three hours watching this latest chapter in the most intriguing of storylines.
A ‘Day Five’ diary account that officially begins at 9.52am, when Bolt saunters down the clubhouse steps — again, the only Mariner dressed in tracksuit pants and gloves — for 20 minutes of stretching, jogging laps with teammates, then a few simple passing drills.
And after that, game on.
Mariners Head of Performance Andrew Young blowing into a whistle as, about him, players split immediately in two — those with bright orange bibs, and those without — for an opposed game that for the next 40 minutes will be all running, sweating, pushing, jostling, passing, tackling, scoring.
And as for how Bolt goes?
Um, he doesn’t.
The world’s greatest athlete instead spending the entire time sat on the sidelines, and on his backside, watching on.
Sure, a couple of times Bolt stretches out. And twice more, claps in goals.
Hell, at one point the world’s greatest athlete even stands, leans against a small fence aaaand … pulls a chunk of grass from his boots.
On Monday, Young had warned the key element to ‘Project Bolt’ would be patience. A day later, coach Mike Mulvey agreeing it could take up to a year.
And so, intrigued, we wait for day six.
A stepladder at the ready.
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