Read the gaffer's thoughts ahead of our opening day fixture with Braintree Town

Firstly, I would like to welcome you all back to Champion Hill for our season opener against Braintree this afternoon, the first day is always a great day in the footballing calendar. It is a lovely feeling walking out at home on the opening day, and I am pleasured and honoured to be able to lead the team out for another year and I hope we can bring you some success this year.

It will be a tough start to our campaign, Braintree improved massively as the season went on and Ryan Maxwell did an excellent job. There has been a change of manager there this summer with Angelo Harrop coming in, and they have signed a few players who have not played at National League South level before, so it will be a little bit of an unknown for us today, but we expect everyone to be competitive this season and today will be no different.

I am very much looking forward to the start of the season. The summer period can be a long one, trying to recruit players and then getting ready for the pre-season games, which always seem to go on for a long time too, so I’m happy that we’re out of it and ready for the first game.

Having said that, it has been a good pre-season for us. We have a lot of new faces in and have had to bed them in slowly and make sure that everyone has got some minutes. It has been a shame that we have had a couple of players carrying injuries, but the majority have come through nice and fit and understanding what we want from them in the season ahead.

There have been positives in everyone’s performances over these seven games, the only real
disappointment has been the injury to Kalvin Kalala, who has picked up an ACL injury, we are unsure whether he will have an operation or not, but if he doesn’t require one, we remain hopeful that he can come back and help us at some point during the season. Josh Hill is still recovering from an injury he picked up at Dartford last season whilst James Comley is almost ready to return following tendonitis, so once they are back involved, we will have a strong squad. If everyone can contribute a little bit, we have a chance of doing well.

I am hoping we can keep everyone fit this year, but we do have a bit more depth with the players that we have signed. We had a good team last year, but we did not have a lot of depth, and probably had three or four fewer players than we ideally needed to have to sustain a playoff push, but I think if we can keep everyone fit, we can challenge for one this time around.

We have deliberately looked for players who can play in several positions, who are also very good players, and this gives us a greater chance of being more consistent. One example is Joe Felix, who started in central midfield at Maidstone and moved to wing-back, after playing at right-back at Hastings in the game before that, and there were still no differences to the quality of his performances, and that was our idea in general, to sign good players who can play several different positions well.

The league is hard with some good teams in it, who have also recruited well, but we always give ourselves a chance of performing well. I think Saturday’s performance [against Maidstone] showed that we will be very competitive and that there will be a lot of positives in our performances. Thank you in advance for your support of us this season.

Gavin Rose