ST ASAPH City manager Daniel Brewerton is keen to highlight the positions despite the season ending before it began.

The Saints were due to take their place in the new Ardal Northern League after a fantastic effort from everyone associated with the club to get their facilities up to the Football Association of Wales’ tier three criteria, despite floods decimating the pitch and changing rooms.

However, the FAW have now decided that anything below tiers one and two will have to wait until next season to resume competitive matches, something that Brewerton said was “no surprise” as attention now turns to stabilising the set-up with a view to hitting the ground running on the off the pitch.

He said: “Obviously, the news is disappointing but comes as no surprise.

“We spoke back in October about how realistic it was that they would get a season up running and I’ve always been very sceptical.

Although it has been very frustrating at times, we are trying to look at this in a positive way now, we spent a lot of time working on how we were going to set up to play and we had the opportunity to try it out in our friendlies.

“We’re going to take this time now to really fine-tune this, and to be fair to the lads they’ve really made the most of a lot of down time by doing their runs to keep their fitness levels up, and some of them have been really impressive.”

Brewerton also praised the work behind the scenes to ensure the club is still in a good financial position, which cannot be said of many across the country with many teams facing possible extinction due to the COVID-19 repercussions.

“We’ve been quite fortunate as a club that we’ve managed to keep our supporters club running so our finances haven’t been hit hard by not playing,” added Brewerton.

“It’s always easy to look back with hindsight and criticise some of the decisions but we just have to look ahead and see how we can make the best of this situation.”