Balmoral isn’t planning on spending much time in FV state league west 4.
After being promoted from state 5 at the end of last season after winning the league, president Enver Malkic said the club is ready to go again.
“We’re pretty confident for the season ahead and we’re aiming to win the league and go back to back,” he said.
“When we sat down a couple of years ago, part of our strategic planning was to go two years in a row. We’ve worked very hard behind the scenes, we had to clean up a lot of things from previous seasons. We laid down the foundations for the seasons ahead which we’ve done and that brought us the success of last season.
“We just don’t want to remain in the league this season, we’re aiming to win the league again and hopefully we’ll make it into state 3 next season but obviously it’s going to be tough with only having top spot as automatic promotion, and second and third play off.
“It’s not going to be easy with the competition this season with a few clubs gunning for the top spot and a few clubs around us strengthened really well as well so, it should be a really, really interesting season.”
Malkic said the pre-season has been strong for the club, with a month remaining until the league fixtures kick off. However, injuries have been beginning to take its toll, yet he said it shouldn’t be an issue come round one.
“We’ve retained almost everyone which was the main priority before we had a look at the market and then we’ve recruited three or four players in positions that we needed to strengthen,” he said.
“We’ve had a fair few practice games already, the results have been pretty good but the injuries are starting to mount up now.
“We’ve got about six or seven starting players out, they should all be back hopefully soon within the next one or two weeks.
“But we’ve got the squad depth, the players that have been coming in have been doing the job pretty well.
“Fingers crossed the rest of the boys are back to full health in the next couple of weeks so they are ready for round one.”
Before the league kicks off, Balmoral has an Australia Cup match this weekend, played after deadline, against East Bentleigh.
“We’re looking forward to it. We had the bye in round one, it would have been good for us to have a game but that’s how it panned out,” Malkic said.
