PLAYER-COACH Adam O’Bree fears it could be a long season for Cricklade in Hellenic League Division One West due to a number of departures at Stones Lane.

Gareth Davies and Tom Price have left for Devizes while striker Ben Carter is taking a season out and other players have been training at rival clubs during pre-season.

To add to the tough times, keeper Devon Brown is out for the first two months of the campaign and O’Bree himself is unsure what his future in football holds after hernia problems last term.

That adds up to a potentially difficult year and one in which boss Graham Jackson could find it hard to replicate or improve on last term’s seventh-placed finish.

“It’s not looking that rosy at Cricklade at the minute. We’ve lost a lot of players and it’s a totally different squad,” said O’Bree.

“We’ve been getting a large turnout to training but a lot of them are youngsters that need time to develop.

“It’s difficult because once the core side go, everyone starts jumping ship.

“People have got a lot of time for the manager (Graham Jackson) and the chairman (Alisdair Ross), and there’s quite a family feel to the club so everyone has left with a heavy heart.

“But players are leaving because they don’t want to get battered every week.

“If everyone stayed then we’d have a really good side. I think people just get frustrated and sometimes in football you need to need a change to freshen things up and get the buzz back.”

An experienced figure in the Cricklade side, O’Bree feels that manager Jackson is faced with a major rebuilding job that will take place throughout the course of the campaign.

O’Bree, who works at @futsal in Kembrey Park, admits the thought of finishing at the lower end of Division One West is a painful one.

“I think it will be a difficult season for Cricklade and it’s not nice knowing that the club is really going to struggle this year,” he said.

“They have just got to do what they can with the squad that they have got and try to rebuild throughout the season.”