Holidays have come and gone – and now it’s back to hard work for Bloemfontein Celtic players.

Phunya Sele Sele will regroup in Bloemfontein on Wednesday to kick off their pre-season training programme with Auguston Leonard and Siyabonga Nontshinga on board as their first new recruits.

The duo joined from Moroka Swallows and Jomo Cosmos, respectively.

The Ghananian and former SuperSport United midfield stalward John Arwuah will only be arriving in South Africa from holidays on Friday, and he will be joining the rest of his new teammates a day later.

“We are expecting all our players to report for pre-season training in the next two days. The only player who will be reporting late for camp is John Arwuah. He will only be landing in Bloemfontein on Friday,” coach Clinton Larsen told bloemfonteincelticfc.co.za.

“For the first two weeks of pre-season our focus will mainly be on fitness testing and conditioning. We want to establish whether players looked well after themselves during the off-season. We will be joined by Dr Derick Coetzee from the University of the Free State – who is the conditioning expert,” he explained.

Larsen, who only had six days to rest in the off-season, said they had invited a number of players for trials as they wanted to add more quality into the team to have a bigger pool of players in his squad.

“All the trialists will be joining us from July 2. They are local and foreign players. Some of them are from PSL clubs while others are playing for national teams in their countries. We want to try them out and see whether they are good enough to play for Celtic,” he said.

“At this point in time we are looking for two wingers, an attacking midfielder, and a central defender. We want to strengthen all our departments before the new season kicks off in August,” he added.

Meanwhile, Celtic will start their 2012/13 season with a tough away trip to Black Leopards in the second week of August. Then they will play against Platinum Stars (home) and Bidvest Wits (away) in their next two outings.