Horsham boss to cast his eye over ‘four or five’ new faces in pre-season

The Hornets return to training on Monday at their new home of Hop Oast ahead of their return to the Bostik Premier Division after a seven-year absence.

Manager Di Paola was keen to improve the squad, but made it clear he wanted a settled team before the new season.

He said: “We’ve got four or five trialists coming in over pre-season that we’ve spoken to.

“For the first three or four sessions we’ll take a view on any we want to keep as part of the squad and go from there.

“We’ve got a few trialists, but not many this year. I want to go with the squad that will take us into the season.

“If you look at the team that finished the play-off final, most of those boys were with us for pre-season.

“In times past we’ve had quite a high turnover of players and I don’t think it works. We don’t want hundreds at training because it dilutes the quality of what you’re trying to do.

“The first couple of friendlies will be giving triallists a chance and after that we’ll be whittling it down to the actual squad we need to run with.”

Di Paola was also champing at the bit to get back to training.

He added: “Just in the last week or so I’ve started to miss it a little bit. It’d be nice to get back to work and obviously going into the new ground will be great.”