‘After one year of experience in Spain, I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to contribute much more this season.’ These were statements made by Nikola Maraš, UD Almería centre-back, at the team’s get-together in Marbella.

The Serbian player expressed his deep satisfaction at having become a player at UD Almería, and in this sense he explained that ‘I’m absolutely delighted. It’s the best for me and for my football career. I feel that my future is within Spanish football and I’d like to succeed here with Almería.’

Maraš is highly optimistic about the new season: ‘Once again, we have got an ambitious project and I sincerely hope we can accomplish the objectives. Actually, we need to be more regular than the previous year.’ Furthermore, as he added, ‘it is very important to have a good defensive scheme because the more times we can keep a clean sheet, the closer we’ll be to winning.’

The 24-year-old Serbian also referred to the head coach, José Gomes, as ‘very ambitious because he has very clear ideas about how he wants us to play football and therefore he is making a hard effort to make us understand his message.’

The players had a short holiday, so in the opinion of the Rojiblanco defender ‘we haven't lost much fitness.’ The Belgrade-born player considers that not only last season was kind of odd because of everything that happened but also the holidays. In this regard, he pointed out that ‘the first days you kept thinking about how we lost in the play-offs, but then you realise that the best thing to do is to start over with a clean slate because the new season will soon be upon us. For example, I didn’t go to my home country so instead, I travelled to Portugal to sort out some personal matters.’