MERBEIN South coach Melville Lyons is confident his team can be competitive this Sunraysia Cricket Association (SCA) season.
After a week-one hiccup when the Saints were forced to pull their teams out of action due to a COVID-19 case, the First Division side are at last set to open their campaign against Gol Gol at Alcheringa Oval on Saturday.
The top grade side have claimed just five wins in the past four campaigns, but there has been a conscious effort at the club to bring some “new blood” to the higher grades.
While young gun Campbell Griffiths will move away to play Premier Cricket for Melbourne and attend university, the Saints have added some experience with top-order batsman Mat Andrews, all-rounder Mark East and pace bowler Anis Bugti, originally from Pakistan, who moved to the area from Sydney.
Josh Stanley has also joined from Irymple, however the youngster is recovering from surgery on a torn ACL and likely won’t be available until after Christmas.
Scoring the fewest runs of any team and conceding the second-highest total, there are a few areas for improvement for the Saints, but veteran Aaron Walder, taking over as skipper, should give the side a cool head at the top.
“We have made a conscious effort to try and bring some newer blood to the top levels where we struggled a bit last season,” Lyons said.
“We did push a lot of our kids to higher grades last year, some maybe before they were ready, so trying to get some other players in to help solidify the top grades was always the goal.
“We’ve got some good veterans all over 40 and our junior program is also going pretty well, it’s that age gap in between that we’ve needed to fill.
“There’s no easy fix but I’m confident we’ll be pretty competitive in First Division this season.”
Lyons said playing numbers across the board at Chaffey Park looked healthy for the new campaign.
“We’ve had about 65 guys train so far and of those you could easily say there are 20 new players or guys who didn’t play last year,” he said.
