Hello! I’m Mark McGuigan, and I’m a 23 yr old professional footballer currently playing for Partick Thistle FC.

This coming season will be my first year playing full time football having spent the last 4 years at Abertay University in Dundee studying Physical Activity and Health – I had my graduation a couple of weeks ago. I’m really looking forward to the new season. I’ve only been at the club a short time, but everyone from the gaffer, the players to the fans have been fantastic with me and I’ll hopefully repay that on the park this season.

This is the first entry to my blog and I’ll be adding to this every few weeks or so.

We’re coming to the end of pre-season just now and the boys are looking in superb shape and are raring to go for our first match – away to Clyde in the first round of the Ramsdens Cup on July 28th.

The gaffer’s been putting us through double sessions everyday and I think everyone’s feeling the benefit.

We had a hard week’s training down at the Catterick Army Garrison with the Scots Guards. It was all work no play with the biggest scandal being Stuart Bannigan’s cowardly attempt to settle a Fifa tournament final – our nightly entertainment in the barracks – with Chris Erskine, by splitting the winning pot because according to him “there’s not enough time to play the game”.

Needless to say,a few of the boys are less than impressed with Banzo’s antics – although his display in our friendly win over Alloa won him a few brownie points.

As well as trying to help the Jags challenge for the league this year, I’ll be helping our main sponsors, macb, by putting my 4 years of hard work (it was, honestly!) to good use, as you’ll be able to ask me any questions you may have relating to football, fitness, diet, exercise or even match preparation.

I’ll shortly be set up on macb’s Facebook page to answer any of your queries and we’ll be doing live Twitter Q and A sessions from time to time – where you can hit me with your questions (be kind though!).

If anyone would like to contact me just now you can on twitter, @88_marky, and I’ll do my very best to get back to you as soon as I can.

That’s it! I’ll hopefully have another one of these up around the first league game of the season.

Cheers,

Mark.