The Shaymen are yet to announce any new additions since Lakeland took over nearly ten days ago.
But the Halifax manager says work has been going on in the background that looks set to come to fruition.
“We’ve got agreements in principle with four players,” he told the Courier.
“So we’re making progress.
“We’ve got deals verbally agreed, which is good.
“It’s just a case of getting paperwork signed, so hopefully we’ll have some announcements to make in the coming days.
“But there’s been things verbally agreed with players for several days, so it’s just waiting on the paperwork to be completed.”
Lakeland says the four are players who have been on his radar since getting the job.
“They were players who we’ve liked and who we’ve brought up in our recruitment meeting, and players who I also mentioned as part of the interview process,” he said.
“I felt they were ones who could come in and do well for us so I’m really pleased with the work we’ve done so far.”
When asked how many signings he expects to make before returning to pre-season training at the end of the month, Lakeland said: “I still think we need to bring in three, maybe four, on top of that, because we’ve obviously got longer term injuries to the likes of Will Smith, Max Wright and Jo Cummings.
“They’re three really important players for us but they’re going to be out for probably the first half of the season.
“So whilst on paper we might have a decent number of bodies to build on, we’ve got those three in particular that aren’t going to be available for a good few months.
“We’ve still got a bit of work to do but I’m pleased with how the first week’s worth of work’s gone.”
Lakeland also confirmed Town will be having several trialists in during pre-season.
“We’ve got several of those confirmed,” he said.
“I think it’s important we have a look at a few that we’ve maybe been made aware of or that we were aware of any but that we want to have a closer look at and get our eyes on prior to either making them an offer or not.
“So we will have a few in for the first couple of weeks.”
Analyst Dylan Mistry and assistant physio Dan Asquith, who were part of Chris Millington’s backroom team, have both left the club, Lakeland said, after accepting offers from Football League clubs.
“It just shows this club gives people a platform, whether you’re a member of staff or a player, to come in and gain experience whilst shwowing people what you’re doing, which gets recognised higher up the food chain,” he said.
“We wish them well and at the moment, everyone else (in the backroom team) is staying in post as far as I’m aware.”
Town will have two testing days, starting tomorrow, at Huddersfield University, to assess the fitness of their squad.
“We’ve had to split it across two days because we couldn’t get everyone in in one day, so half will be in on Tuesday, half on Wednesday and then everyone will be back in fully from Monday,” Lakeland said.
“They’ll be doing some questionnaires around past medical history, some functional movements screening and a concussion test, that gives us a player baseline for re-testing if they were to ever get concussed during the season.
“And then general strength tests, height, weight, that type of thing.”
Leave a Reply