AFTER a turbulent end to last season and a remarkably quiet summer, here we are once again gearing up for another campaign. With Raj Singh nothing but a distant memory, we can finally focus on what happens on the pitch rather than the under-capacity stand. Despite the increasing amount of football that finds its way on to television over the summer months, there’s nothing quite like the start of the new season to get you going.

I’m not sure I can remember a stranger off-season than this year. The weeks after the season ended almost felt like they could be our last. Fans were split depending on their philosophical views on the club’s ownership, management and players were allegedly leaving; out of nowhere, it felt like our club was a sinking ship. Now, just a matter of days before the season kicks off, it’s as though none of it happened; a bad dream from which we awoke and just got on with things.

Off the pitch, everything seems to be ticking along once again. We have a new chief executive who is actually paid. This is a massive step forward for the club and one which has been desperately needed for a year or so. There’s no point being professional on the pitch if we can’t replicate it off the pitch. If the Raj Singh saga was required to push through this change, then it might have just been worth it. Time will tell. We need to extract as much revenue from streams other than the turnstiles and hopefully the new guy will do that. We might even see a few more advertising boards up this season!

On the pitch, stability has been the key. Following the speculated exodus, only Josh Falkingham left the club and that was for a return to full-time football. Hopefully, this stability in playing talent will stand us in good stead, particularly in the early part of the season where our rivals could still be bedding in new players. That is particularly important when you consider how vital our form over the opening months was to us maintaining our place in the upper echelons of the league last season. We can’t win the league in August or September but with the compressed nature of the fixtures we could find ourselves a long way behind our rivals.

Speaking of rivals, I can’t help but think that this season’s National League North is going to be brutal. While all of the talk has been about Salford City dominating the league, I have a sneaky feeling that they won’t be starting flag to finishing champions like Fylde last season. The league has more full-time clubs and a host of others with lofty ambitions like ourselves. The league is going to be very competitive and I suspect the fine margins will make the difference.

For us, those fine margins will almost certainly be the number of goals we concede. I have no doubt that we’ll score a hatful as usual. We’ve never gone short of a goal or two. However, if we are to be challenging for the top spot like the management and players feel we will be, conceding fewer goal will be crucial. While there were errors from defenders which were punished regularly, as a team, we need to defend better, both when out of possession but also being more prepared when we have the ball. If we can rekindle the solidity we displayed in the previous four years, this season could be a good one.

First up for us is arguably the toughest game of the season. We’ll be the first team to find out how much Salford City have progressed over the summer since turning full-time. Hopefully, the thrashing we took on the final day of last season is a distant memory and can be chalked down to the off-field shenanigans. We can’t judge our season based on this one game but it would be nice if we could come away from Old Trafford – sorry, Moor Lane, with something.