CHALVEY Sports manager Merv Lloyd will put his faith in the same group of players that won the Hellenic Division Two East title last season.

Sports retained their crown and won promotion into Division One last term and Lloyd is delighted some players have turned down moves away from Arbour Park to remain with The Stabmonks.

He has challenged his team to improve in certain areas, scoring more goals is one of those, but has backed Chalvey to be competitive in the new campaign.

Lloyd told the Observer: “We’ve been training for a couple of weeks now to get everyone back together. We’ve kept everyone and brought in a few to hopefully make us stronger than last season.

“We’ve got some ideas and work to do and will put that into practise in the friendlies. I want to start where we finished at the end of last season and not bring in lots of new players.

“We’ve just got a solid side and will go with the same set-up from last season, then go with the changes we need to make to tidy up around the edges.

“I’m not interested in changing the personnel because that would give me a massive problem.

“A few have been approached by similar clubs, or from a level or two above, but have politely declined because they want to carry on playing for Chalvey and continue with the project.

“Hopefully we can give a good account of ourselves as a club in the Hellenic League with two sides. Not many clubs can do that and it’s really positive for us because people have seen how well we did last season.

“Chalvey is a good project to be involved in because everyone is working hard and it is all positive. All the lads are raring to go.”

He continued: “We will not be as dominant as last season and you don’t need too much intelligence to know that but we still want to be there or thereabouts.

“We’ve set ourselves a target and we will see what comes up.

“We were extremely competitive against first division sides in cup matches last season and came from two goals down to win 6-2 in one, so we know what we need to do.

“We probably need to score more goals than last season. We created chances but didn’t find the back of the net enough.

“We will work on our mistakes from last season and see where we end up, but teams will have to be at the top of their game to get anything from us.”

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