Chalford host Cheltenham Athletic on Saturday looking for their 10th league win in what is already proving to be another stellar campaign.

They are of top of Division One of the Northern Senior League after winning nine and drawing two of their opening 11 games, and are hoping to win the title and with it promotion to the County League after a number of near misses.

“It’s been our target for the last five years,” admitted manager Ben Powell, who first linked up with the club as a 14-year-old when he was a pupil at Thomas Keble School well over two decades ago.

They’ve finished runners-up in the last two completed seasons and were also going well in the two intervening campaigns that were cut short by Covid.

They’re also a very good cup team – earlier this season they won the Reg Davis Cup for the third time in a row – and Powell said: “We’ve been fortunate that we’ve been able to keep a good group of players together.

“We’ve kept hold of the core group and added a few more.

“Some of them have been at the club for 12 or 15 years, while a lot have been with us since we got promoted from Division Two.”

That promotion season came in 2016/17, a season that saw them win 24 of their 30 games while drawing the other six.

Powell, who had a spell as the club’s player/manager when he was in his mid-20s, was assistant to Lee Pritchard when they won the Division Two title and took over as the main man soon after the start of the following season when Pritchard sustained a bad ankle injury.

“It’s all evolved from there,” said Powell, who will be 38 in February.

So how does Powell set up his team?

“We try to play the right way,” he said. “By that I don’t mean we’re always playing out from the back, we try to play the way that suits the conditions.

“If we’re playing on a boggy pitch we don’t try to play through midfield, we go back to front.

“We don’t overplay, we can be direct, we try to play in the right areas of the pitch.

“I like clean sheets and the players have to work hard, we don’t carry lazy players.”

And he doesn’t ask his players to do things that they are not comfortable with.

“It’s all about having the right players in the right areas,” he continued.

“When everyone is available we’ve got a squad of 18-20 players, but depending on who is available we’ll play 3-4-3, 4-3-3, 3-5-2, 4-4-2.

“I don’t like square pegs in round holes and it’s something the boys have bought into.”

They certainly have and none more so than striker Jack Hughes, who already has more than 20 goals to his name this season.

“He’s an out-and-out centre-forward, he joined us about a year ago,” said Powell.

“We’d lost our goalscorer Andy Maryon to a nasty ankle injury. 

“Jack had been playing for AFC Renegades in Stroud League Division Two, he came along to help us out for a couple of games, scored a couple of goals, enjoyed it and said he wanted to stay.

“He gets on well with the other lads, we’re lucky to have him.”

And they certainly needed him at the weekend because they were trailing 1-0 at home to Stonehouse Town reserves at half-time before going on to win 4-1.

“He scored two minutes into the second half and 16 minutes later he’d got a hat-trick,” said Powell.

“Everything he hits seems to find the back of the net. He’s got a bit of everything. He’s 6ft, quite quick with two good feet. He can play with his back to goal but can also play on the shoulder of the last defender.”

No wonder that Powell said of Hughes, who is in his mid-20s, that he’s “a great find”.

And he could have a new strike partner in the next couple of weeks because Powell is hopeful that the aforementioned Maryon will be available for the home game against second-placed Longlevens reserves a week on Saturday.

“He’s been out for 14 months,” said Powell, who knows what it takes to come back from an injury.

“I ruptured my cruciate in a cup final,” he said. “I thought, ‘Right that’s me done, I’ll take a break from football’.

“But by the October my wife Jenny was pushing me out of the door on a Saturday afternoon!”

That was in 2016/17 when he played an important role as Lee Pritchard’s assistant in their promotion-winning campaign.

And much as he enjoys his role on the touchline – he was assistant manager at King’s Stanley for three years – he still enjoys playing too.

“I played for our 3rds in the Stroud League a couple of months ago when they were short and the 1sts didn’t have a game,” he said.

“And I also play vets’ football for C&G every couple of weeks, I’ve been doing that for a year now.”

So what position does he play?

“I play everywhere, I’m a utility player,” he said. “I played centre-half for the 3rds and I play centre midfield for the vets.

“But I’ve also played in goal and growing up I was always a winger.”

He was good enough to play for Shortwood United Under-18s back in the day and also played for their reserves, as well as a handful of games for their first team, but while he has good memories of those days, his only focus now is Chalford.

He’s also the club’s vice-chairman, a position he’s held for five years, so it’s not just the flagship team that keeps him busy.

“After Covid the aim was to get four adult teams out on a Saturday and we’ve managed to do that,” he said.

Those teams play in divisions one, three and five of the Stroud League and the club also have more than 130 players in their youth set-up.

“We’d like to have more, we’ve got fantastic facilities,” said Powell, who grew up in Bussage, just a long goal-kick from Chalford.

“Our 4th team is made up of a lot of under-17s, it’s a way of introducing them into adult football.”

Powell, a dad-of-two who lives in Brockworth, has been involved in the adult game for 20 years, of course, a period that has seen great success for Chalford.

“When I first started we were in Stroud League Division Two,” he said. “This is the highest we’ve been that I can remember.”

And if Powell has his way they will be going higher still in the next few months.