Ilford manager and chairman Adam Peek will have plenty to do this pre-season as his side look to start to put COVID behind them, as the team and staff will be hoping to go back to a regular season following a year and a half of disruptions. ‘Peeky’ as known by his players, is looking for a ‘consistent squad to perform at a consistent level’ – something Ilford struggled with at times this season.
What have you been up to with this time off? Has anything significant happened at Ilford or have you not had much on while it’s been lockdown?
“There’s always stuff going on, we don’t stop because the seasons stopped. Lots of stuff going on with the youth teams, they’re still playing, so our focus has been getting their season back up and completed. They’ve been using the stadium and the pitch. So I’ve still been at the ground and preparations are happening both on and off the pitch for next season.”
Is there any football happening at Ilford at the minute?
“Yes, we’ve got the under 16s and under 18s playing there. It’s good for them to experience playing there and at the moment because of facilities etc its more financially beneficial for us to have them playing at our ground rather than pay for somewhere else. They’ll be looking to finish their season which started last week. So, we’re there every Sunday now until the end of May.”
Do you know when fans are going to be allowed back to games even if it was just to catch an under 18 game?
“You can’t have spectators at the ground just yet. You can have club representation, media and that type of thing. There are parents allowed as they’re all under 18 also, but in terms of spectators no, not right now.”
With lockdown restrictions easing when do you get together with the team again and how excited are you for hopefully some normality?
“I made the decision not to enter the leagues competition that they’ve been running. For a number of reasons and we’ve made a decision not to bring the players back until pre-season, firstly the cost of us playing in these tournaments for refs, washing the kits and all the other things we have to pay for, the cost outweighs the benefit. It’s friendly competitions that will end in May and then you have another 3 weeks off. But also I’m very cautious that lots of the players haven’t played for 3 or 4 months, for them to come back with very little training and then go straight into competitive games would be a risk in terms of players getting injured and I’ve even seen it in the last few weeks you know, the teams that are playing I’ve seen broken legs, somebody’s fractured an ankle, and I didn’t really want to put my boys through that. So we’ll be resuming back into our normal pre-season dates which will be around about the 12thof June. We’ll do around a 7-week pre-season so that we’re ready for when the new season starts which we believe will be early part of August.”
When we spoke before you mentioned the frustration of fixture congestion and it meaning the team couldn’t train properly or as much as you’d like, are you in better shape now to start training properly and have more of a routine?
“Yeah, obviously at this level you evaluate your squad and players evaluate their own situations, I didn’t want to come back to early because you could end up playing a load of friendlies with players that may not be with you. We’ll start to have the conversations with the players in the next month or so, the ones that we have at the minute and see what they want to do going forward also. We are looking to improve the squad after an inconsistent season last season, it’s very hard to judge because of how inconsistent the actual season was because of COVID, but we feel we need to strengthen, and we’ll be looking to do that between now and June and hopefully the boys that we want to return will return.”
Recruitment I’m sure will be a big thing for you over the summer, have any moves been made yet from yourself you can tell me about? Do you have a process of finding players?
“No not right now, there is a lot of conversations with players but lots of players don’t commit to new teams at this time of the season, first of all a lot of them are still playing so they will finish out their season. They’ll also wait to see what other clubs are interested, players start committing around June time saying yes, they’ll come to training or pre-season. Pre-season is a very difficult time for managers because obviously everyone is looking to build their squad and players are approached by a number of teams and then it’s up to you to try convincing them that Ilford’s the right place to be.”
What areas are you looking to improve?
“I wouldn’t say there’s specific area’s we’re looking to improve, we want to improve the squad, we know we conceded a lot of goals so the defence needs tightening up, we also only had a couple of players that contributed to scoring, so I’d say that there aren’t specific positions, just that we are looking to improve the squad as a whole. We still believe we’ve got some really good players and players that are good enough to play at this level and it’s just about trying to build around those and keep those with us. It’s never easy, we don’t have any money or budgets to play players and there is a lot of teams in our league that do, which means we have a smaller pool of players to reach out.”
Finally…
What would be your main goal for next season? Is there anything specifically from last season you’re hoping to correct or change?
“From my point of view there’s a lot of things we did well last year, we had a really good run in the Vase, we tend to come alive against the top teams, our results against the top teams were really good. You never go into a league or season other than you want to finish as high as possible, obviously we’d love to win the league and win a cup, but we are a club still in development, we don’t have the financial backing some of the other clubs do but our absolute goal is to improve on league position and improve on our consistency, we went out in the first round of the FA Cup which I’m not happy about. We want to improve in that for sure, but we want a consistent squad that perform at a consistent level and if we can get that we’ll be competitive. If anything, I want to win everything, win every league and every cup I enter, is that realistic? Anything is realistic if you put your mind to it, but we’re also realistic to know that we’re in a very tough league and we’ve got to do our best to build a squad capable of competing in that league across a season rather than one or two games here or there.”
