Manager Chris Hughton was interviewed ahead of our opening pre season friendly of the summer today against FC Meyrin and explained that he’s aiming for a top six finish in the Championship this year.
Speaking to the Official Site Hughton said he’d been pleased with the business we’d done so far this summer in terms of new playing staff recruits and also spoke of his pleasure at how we had opened his first pre season schedule at the club.
‘I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it so far, the set-up has been excellent, but I’m here to do a job and be competitive, and that means giving us a real opportunity to get promotion. The one negative for me is that I would have liked to have finished in a better position than what we did at the end of the season, but everything else has been excellent: the facilities, which are well documented, and the staff who were already here.’
Hughton went on to say that the club have a great behind the scenes staff and that’s why when he came in he only added Ewan Chester to the recruitment department and Colin Calderwood to the coaching staff, because other than that he knows he inherited a cracking bunch of ‘dedicated and focused’ folks.
With Antti Niemi departing since then, he has obviously added new goalkeeping coach Ben Roberts over the summer to our staff.
As for the future and our aims, he goes on to say.
‘We need to be far better than we were as a team last season, but it is possible. If you look at the teams who have been in the play-offs in the last few seasons then it’s quite obvious that it is possible to make that transition. The recruitment department are still working very hard and considering the numbers we lost at the end of the season, we know that we still need to recruit. By the start of the season we need to be near the numbers we want.’
Hughton knows to get the right people though often you need to be patient and whilst every manager in the game would like to have their final pot of players already in place by this stage of pre season it rarely, if ever, works out like that.
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