IT'S time for the players to put their feet up and look forward with confidence to next season.

The lads deserve a good rest after working really hard in recent months and everybody is back for pre-season training on July 1.

I'm hoping they will then be ready for a long and successful campaign, one in which we look to try and achieve promotion to the Nationwide Conference.

We can look forward to next season with a lot of optimism because of the way we finished, it was almost championship form. We must now make sure it is championship form when we start again.

It's certainly going to be a busy summer for me. There will be no respite as I try to bring in new players to the squad.

Like all managers, you have to keep your eye on the ball throughout the summer because you don't really want to miss out on someone.

I will be hard at it looking for players, looking at lists and seeing who is being released elsewhere and who might become available. I've got to be watching, reading and getting in touch with clubs all the time.

Unfortunately, we ended the season on a bit of a downer with defeat at Gainsborough Trinity. The game had that traditional end-of-season feel about it.

Normally, in these situations, the team that gets the first goal goes on and wins comfortably. We never really got started and Trinity deserved the three points.

We changed a few things around and maybe it was too many at once. It caused us problems but it's nothing that people can't do. We started with George Clegg up front and Paul Carty at right-back with Rob Warner injured.

It's jobs that some of the players have done before, but I did make alterations.

Even bringing a substitute on meant three or four different positional moves and maybe that disrupted us a little bit. However, their goals came from individual mistakes more than anything else and that was disappointing.

We just did not play well. I think a lot of the lads are tired. They have worked their socks off over the past few months to get us in the position we are in.

So although it's disappointing, because nobody enjoys losing any game, I'd rather us travel to Gainsborough and lose 3-0 to finish seventh rather than to go down into the Southern Division.

All that was riding on this game was whether we finished seventh or eighth. If you said that to someone back then, they'd say you were joking. So the lads deserve credit for that.

Despite losing, it was an important game for Christian Moore because he was able to make his return to first-team action. Christian got half-an-hour at the end and come through unscathed. He's worked really hard in training and done a lot of running after games.

He's fit now, so hopefully we can get him right for next year.