BASINGSTOKE Town's pre-season campaign will continue on today when Salisbury City visit the Camrose (kick-off 3pm).

The Blue Square Premier outfit will provide a different test to Southampton, who beat Town 5-2 last weekend, and manger Frank Gray is looking forward to casting his eye over some more trialists as he goes about building his squad for the upcoming campaign.

"It should be an interesting game," he said. "The basis of the squad from last week will be there again, but there will be one or two players there who did not feature last week for me to look at "It's always good for players to get games under their belts but I am not really worried about the result. We are still in the process of building a team and it's about how the players perform."

A number of new faces appeared against Southampton last week.

Ross Kitteridge, an 18-year-old goalkeeper from the Reading academy, began the game between the posts before being replaced at half-time by Tom Taylor, who has spent the past couple of seasons as the Havant and Waterlooville back-up 'keeper.

Aiden Lewis, a youngster from Didcot Town, had a decent game at right-back, while Portuguese duo Ruddi, who has played first division football in his homeland, and Siddy Jombatti, who spent time at Weymouth last season, started in midfield.

A new-look forward line saw Phil Ruggles, who is 25 and scored 16 goals in 46 games for Carshalton in the Ryman Premier last season, partner opening goalscorer James Faulkner.

Faulkner is 20 and a former Wycombe trainee who moved to Aylesbury United midway through last season, scoring 15 goals in 25 games for the Southern League division one outfit.

"James is one player that I have spoken to and more or less agreed to sign for next season," Gray said. "He scored a lot of goals last season and I believe he can make the step up."

Among the substitutes last weekend were Town youngsters Marc Vockins and Scott Perkins, Jidi Ogunbote, who Gray knows from his time at Woking, Scott Murphy, who is assistant manager Gerry Murphy's son, and Carl Gibbs, a striker who had an unsuccessful stint at Town a year ago.

Young left-back Tom Bird, who Gray was expecting at training last week, chose to go on trial at Eastleigh instead, while the manager has not heard from another youngster, Dave Cates.

Basingstoke received an unexpected windfall earlier this week when former player Sergio Torres moved from Wycombe to Peterborough for a fee of somewhere between £100,000 and £150,000.

When the Argentinean was sold to Wycombe three years ago, the club negotiated a 20 per cent sell-on fee and that will now earn Town something in the region of £20,000.

However, Gray has no ambitions of getting his hands on the cash.

"I don't know what will happen to that money because that decision is not down to me," he said.

"It's the club's money and I will not be asking for it."

9:31am Saturday 19th July 2008

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