Chris Nunn confident Histon are ready to ‘kick on’ with promotion push during 2025/26 season

While their campaign may have ended with just one victory from 11 league outings, boss Chris Nunn is confident that his Histon side are ready to ‘kick on’ next season.

For a while the 12th-placed Stutes were on the fringes of the United Counties League Premier Division South play-offs, but once their form tailed off Nunn opted to give some of the club’s youngsters a first taste of senior football with a view to them potentially stepping up on a more regular basis in 2025/26.

And having also now made the necessary changes on and off the pitch since Nunn’s appointment in October 2023, he now has his eyes on a promotion push.

“We started the season slowly for eight games or so while we were still tidying the squad up, but then when you look at the next 16 games, results wise we were second,” said Nunn.

“We then dropped a few points around February and March and that’s when we decided to give a lot of young lads a chance and they did very well. Some of them will be involved again next year.

“Speaking to the board, there’s been a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes and we all feel the club is now in the strongest position that it has been in for a while.

“Only the top two sides have done the double over this season and that shows how competitive we already are, but now we need to bridge that gap and that’s the target.

“I feel the play-offs is the minimum we should be looking at. I came here to help the club get promotion and that’s what we’re looking to achieve.

“We’ll learn from our mistakes this season. We had a good go and fell short, but now everything is ready for us to kick on next year.”

The dust may have barely settled on the 2024/25 season, yet Nunn is already busy plotting his summer recruitment.

He is not expecting to have to make wholesale alterations, particularly with a group of ‘talented youngsters’ at his disposal.

However, he believes that a sprinkling of ‘game changers’ are required to move Histon into the higher echelons of the division.

“We’ve got a very good squad with a group of talented youngsters, but we probably do lack a bit of experience in key areas,” he added.

“We need four or maybe five of what you would call game changers, but it won’t be something like 10 or 11 new players coming in.

“Players obviously leave – that’s non-league football – but the sense I’ve got from the squad is that a lot of them want to stay.

“They can see what we’re trying to do at the club and what we’re building towards.

“Even though we finished lower than what we wanted, the fact we were in the play-off picture for a good few weeks gives me confidence we aren’t far away.

“We’ve built some solid foundations and now we just need to take the next step.”

As well as bringing in new players over the coming weeks, Nunn will also be working to bolster his coaching team following the departures of Jordan Williams and Matt Vernon.

Meanwhile, Histon signed off for the term with back-to-back defeats over the Easter weekend.

On Saturday Nunn’s side went down 2-0 at Northampton ON Chenecks before losing 3-1 at home to already-relegated Godmanchester Rovers 48 hours later.

Former Histon frontman Dan Brown put visiting Godmanchester in front at Bridge Road before the hosts equalised via defender Karl Saffery’s strike from distance.

However, Reece Page restored the away team’s lead before the break and they made sure of the outcome after the restart through attacker Declan Rogers, who was playing his final game before retirement.