WITHAM Town have added to their midfield by signing the hard-working Sam Owusu from Brentwood Town.

Assistant Witham Town manager, James Robinson, said he and boss Adam Flint had felt the need for a grafting presence in the midfield and Owusu was a player they had been tracking, so he was pleased to have the former Brentwood captain on board.

Robinson said: “Sam is a player who works really hard and that was what we were looking for.

“When we played Brentwood last year, he really stood out with his work rate.

“We wanted to add that into our midfield as we felt we needed someone with legs in there who could get up and down the pitch and Sam, with his work rate, fits that bill.

“He also seems like a really good lad who will fit in and that’s just as important.”

Having opened their pre-season with games at FC Clacton and Great Wakering Rovers this week, Witham are due to continue their preparations for the Bostik League division north season with a trip to Thurlow Nunn League division one side Halstead Town on Saturday.

Robinson said after getting the opening games played, that he and Flint expected to start trimming their squad down now and games over the next few weeks would be a chance to fine tune for the coming league campaign.

“At the moment, it’s still quite early for us” he added.

“We had the game at Clacton last weekend and then at Great Wakering on Tuesday and the pleasing thing has been that people have got important minutes under their belts.

“We’ve had six or seven sessions of training where we’ve just done conditioning work and now we’ve had the two games and after that we are going to look to cut the numbers down and we’ll start with organisational work.

“We’ll start looking at formations and how we want to play and that will come this week and in the coming friendlies.

“The first two were a chance for people to impress and get minutes under the belt and we’re now moving forward with organisation.

“It hasn’t been a quiet pre-season intentionally, but I think you have to get two to three lots of 90 minutes under the belt.

“You don’t want too many games, but I’ve seen some clubs with ten games planned and they then have to play a full league campaign of 45 plus games.

“We don’t want to burn players out - we just want to get them ready for that first game.”