JEFF Roberts’ Corsham Town side have run the gauntlet during pre-season as their new manager looks to put his own stamp on the Southbank.

Former Calne Town and Wootton Bassett Town boss Roberts was named as Trevor Rawlings’ successor at the end of May and the new Corsham chief has opted to hand his troops some difficult friendly assignments over the summer to ensure they were handed the sternest tests possible.

Roberts’ men have taken on two local Southern League outfits in the form of Chippenham Town and Swindon Supermarine and the Southbank boss is hoping that those minutes in the bank will prove vital contributions to his team’s upcoming Toolstation League First Division efforts.

“I don’t see the point in us playing teams that we’re going to beat 6-1 or 7-1 – we wanted to play some teams from a higher level,” said Roberts.

“We’re not interested in scorelines at all. We just look at the games as training sessions and it’s better when they’re tough games.

“We lost 3-0 to Chippenham Town and I thought that we played really well in the first half against Supermarine.

“We beat Shrivenham 3-1 in our first game but we had a tough game against Highmoor Ibis from the Hellenic League too – we beat them 4-3.

“We’ve kept a lot of the players from last season and we’ve brought back a couple of guys that had left at the end of last season like Aaron Ledgister, Ryan Tyrell and Matty Jenkins. We’ve also managed to get Ben Thomson in from Melksham.

“We may look to bring a few new faces in but we’ll see how things are going.

“A few of the players have got some bad habits where they try and play quite direct and we’ll be trying to get rid of that as the season goes on because we want to get it down and play it.”