The Ottery St Mary 2016/17 season ended under the Washbrook Meadow floodlights on Wednesday night when they lost 1-0 to Otterton and so went out of the Golesworthy Cup – a competition they won last year.

It brought to an end a season that began in August and ran for almost 33 weeks seeing the Otters play a total of 29 matches.

They had very similar home and away record by season’s end with six wins from 15 home games and five wins from 14 away matches.

Of the 29 games in total, they won 11 and lost 11, drawing the other seven.

They kept three clean sheets at home and as many away while they failed to score in three home games and drew a blank at four away venues.

The Otters scored 56 goals throughout the campaign and shipped 59.

Otters boss Dave Fairweather said: “As an over view of the campaign I’d have to use the word ‘frustrating’.

“The frustration began with what I felt was a poor pre-season when players were clearly not as committed as I would have liked them to have been and, lets face it, in this business, if you do not have a good pre-season then, come the business end of the campaign, you will struggle and our season did peter out in disappointing fashion.”

There have been positives from the campaign, none more so that I have seen clear evidence that the core strengths that I am keen to see run through the team are being adhered too and we have set the basis this season for what I sincerely hope will be on-going development, progress and, ultimately, success.”

Fairweather added: “If I have one end-of-campaign wish than it would be that we are able to add new faces this summer and then get everybody, and I mean everybody, into pre-season training from day one so we can begin the important work of team bonding and working on systems etc that would mean we were able to hit the ground running at the start of the next Macron League campaign.”

He continued: “In terms of player recruitment I am going to work hard to make sure that the players we do bring in are not only good players, but also happy to buy into what we want to do as a club. I remain totally committed and indeed focussed on the fact that we are a community club and we need to be able to be giving local young players the platform on which to develop their football skills.

“Of course we need to ‘bring in’ additional talent, but any new players must be the sort who will be able to slot into our way of thinking and playing.”