The beaches are packed, the beer gardens too. Milk-bottle legs are a thing of the past and Ambre Solaire have never known it so good.
But while the recent heatwave has been greeted with delight by most across the UK, for footballers the clement conditions means one thing – the hardest time of year has been made a little more difficult.
Accordingly, Sylvain Distin’s face as he made his way out of the tunnel at Ewood Park bore the hallmarks of a man being put through the pre-season ringer.
“I think I need to sit down,” he smiled, perching himself against an advertising hoarding next to the dugouts.
Distin was one of three players – Steven Pienaar and Darron Gibson the others – to have played the full 90 minutes as Everton continued their pre-season preparations with a 3-1 win over Blackburn Rovers on Saturday . The Frenchman may be approaching his 36th birthday, but his fitness is not an issue.
“I am the oldest player at the club, yes!” he laughs. “But we have needed some youngsters in the squad. Guys like me are not going to play forever, even if I want to.”
The youngsters look to be gathering at the door, if the Blackburn game is anything to go by at least.
Ross Barkley was the first half’s outstanding performer at Ewood, whilst John Stones (19) and Luke Garbutt (20) featured after the break. Even as Distin speaks, behind him the on-loan Barcelona teenager Gerard Deulofeu, who didn’t feature in the game, is being put through his paces by the Blues’ new coaching team.
“You need youngsters,” says Distin. “But they need to start playing now and not just at the last minute when you need them. You need to have a brave mentality and we’ve got plenty of youngsters like that who have more than enough to play in the Premier League.
“It is good for the club if they can come through. They are part of the squad, have been training with us and have been playing in pre-season.
“But you can train as many times as you want with the first team, but nothing will replace playing an actual game.
“I’ve been in a position once or twice where I haven’t been playing, and while you can run all you want in training, it’s during games that you get your experience. The more the youngsters train with us, the more chance they have of playing in the first team and the more experience they are going to get.
“That experience is vital. Some players can be great in training, but in a stadium it’s a different atmosphere, a different pressure, so you need to test yourselves in games during pre-season.”
Everton’s youngsters, not to mention their elder statesmen, will get the perfect opportunity to test themselves in the next week or so, as the club embarks on its latest tour of the USA, where it will participate in the inauguaral International Champions Cup.
Distin and co. touched down in San Francisco on Monday, ahead of their opening match against Italian champions Juventus.
They will visit Los Angeles and Miami in the next seven days.
Such tours, traditionally, have been used by the club not just for the vital conditioning work that goes on during them, but also to improve team spirit.
Distin, though, believes such measures are not necessarily required.
“The team spirit is there already,” he says. “Most of the guys have been here for years, and the three or four guys who have joined us have felt like it was home from the first day.
“It’s really easy to settle down in a team like Everton. It might sound a bit clichéd, but that’s the truth. We have a good group of guys.
“These tours have been good at improving that spirit, but if you look at last season we didn’t go on tour and still had a great start to the season. It’s not about where you go, it’s about how you prepare and how you approach every game. I don’t think just because we are testing ourselves against the likes of Juve or other clubs, it means we are going to have a better start to the season.”
Distin has, of course, found himself in the strange position this summer of adapting to the arrival of a new manager. After five years under David Moyes, the defender is having to adjust to the new style of Roberto Martinez.
Thankfully, the early signs appear to be promising.
“It has been good,” Distin says. “I’ve never known an easy pre-season, so it’s just a different way of training.
“But it’s still hard work. At the moment we don’t know that much about the manager, but we know about training.
“He likes to start from the back, so that’s what we are trying to do. We have been working on it during training, and pre-season games are the perfect time to try that.
“We are trying pretty much everything at the moment – playing long, playing short and playing it out from the back.
“Everybody seems to be on board, but you have to be if you are going to play out from the back. The goalkeeper will be a big part of the game, the centre-backs are split so there’ll be nobody in between them and the keeper will need to concentrate a bit more.
“It’s a bigger squad now. So far we haven’t lost any players and have got three or four good quality players in. We have always had a small squad but now we are starting to look more like a normal team now.”
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