Tuesday 22 March 2016 13:51, UK
Roy Hodgson says he will not lock his England players away at their Euro 2016 training base in Chantilly and wants to create a normal living environment.
England head to the major championships in the summer on the back of a perfect qualification campaign and are set to face Wales, Russia and Slovakia in Group B.
The Football Association has picked the Chantilly site, in the Picardy region of northern France, due to its serene nature and good transport links around the country.
Hodgson has given a positive review of the location, admitting it provides the perfect balance of top-class training facilities and places for his players to relax.
Former England manager Fabio Capello faced criticism when he ran the training base in South Africa for the 2010 World Cup "like a prison camp" - according to Rio Ferdinand - and Hodgson thinks isolating players from the world is unhealthy.
"We trust the players," Hodgson told Sky Sports News HQ.
"We think that when they're not working they'll be still thinking and preparing for the games. But we don't want to lock them away.
"We want to say to them 'if you want to go out and realise the world exists and it isn't football 24/7, then please go out and enjoy a coffee or visit your friends and families'.
"In the evening they will come back for dinner time and work as we would do normally. We're trying to reproduce an environment which isn't vastly different to their normal life because we want to produce performances that aren't vastly different to the performances they put in each week with their Premier League teams."
England will be staying at the prestigious Auberge du Jeu de Paume, with their training base nearby.
They will train at the Stade des Bourgognes, a municipal ground that is home to an amateur side, which is currently being redeveloped to meet England's requirements.
"I think it's a really good training base," Hodgson said. "The hotel and location in Chantilly is excellent. It ticks all the boxes.
"As far as the field and the stadium is concerned, a whole lot of work is going into that. It's not ready at this moment in time but by the time we get there in June it will be as close to Wembley as you can get, as all the previous training pitches we've worked on at tournaments have been perfect.
"The surroundings are good. It's woody. It's fairly quiet. The pitch will be very good. There's a second pitch behind which we can utilise for goalkeeper training or any other physical work we wanted to do in order to save the pitch from being cut up by any conditioning work that we might want to do."
