After consecutive seasons of play-off misery, Larkfield & New Hythe start their very first season in the SCEFL Premier Division this weekend with a trip to Rusthall. 

Boss Danny Lye like all SCEFL bosses can’t wait for the season to begin, and he knows how important 2024/2025 could be for his progressive Club.

“The team, the Club, the squad that we’re putting together are all excited about the new season, we now just have to perform,” Lye told us in the build-up to kick off weekend. 

He went on: “I hope we can get into a rhythm earlier than we did last year as we made a shaky start in the First Division; we had a new team but this year we have “only” got six or seven new boys and hopefully they have gelled quickly enough so that we can start strongly!” 

“It’s important that we get a good start, the nucleus of the team is still there, some have left the Club as I put a bit of a wage structure in place and those who didn’t agree have gone, but the new recruits are good. We have made some good signings and really getting off to a good start makes it easier as the boys will get a bit of confidence and there will be less pressure.” 

“We have signed players like Ben Davisson and Callum Empatage into the midfield, we’ve changed things a little bit, we want to be big and strong and be able to play football in what we know will be quite a physical league – we want to be able to compete in the aggression side of things.

“Disappointingly Matt Day won’t start the season, which is a blow after his goals last year, but I think he’ll do well in the top division, but we’ve put people in around him to hopefully make it easier to not depend on his goals as last year in stages, if Matty didn’t score we were struggling. We’ve signed a couple of new wingers which will hopefully give us more goals and more aggression on the wings as well as a target man up top which was missing last year and so we are looking strong in attack.” 

“It’s a vitally important season for the Club with the plans for the new ground, I’m not a man who “just” wants to stay up or finish tenth, we always want to win and my management team have already said that its play-offs minimum – that is our aim. We’ve got a squad good enough to compete and I do think that we will surprise a few teams. We’re winners and we want to win.” 

“Rusthall away on Saturday will be a good test beyond that I haven’t really looked at the other fixtures; when I was playing, I didn’t really look at them as you should only really deal and focus on who you are playing as it doesn’t matter if its top or bottom of the League.” 

“We know that the top boys will always be challenging, last year we struggled against teams down the bottom which is something we can’t do otherwise we’ll be down among them.”