NEW Gillingham manager Neale Cooper says he will sit down this week to sort out which out of contract players will be at Priestfield next season.

A number of the club’s key players – including skipper Paul Smith – need fresh deals in the summer and have been waiting for a new boss to be appointed before their futures are sorted out.

Before worrying about the teams Gillingham will face in League 1, Cooper’s first task will be to sort out the future of his own squad.

However, Cooper admitted he would be relying heavily on his assistant Ronnie Jepson, who has worked with the squad since December.

The 41-year-old Scot said: "Ronnie will have to be the hitman. I know we have a strong group of players but I only a couple of them personally.

"I had Alan Pouton on loan and Darius Henderson scored a hat-trick past us (Hartlepool) last season when he was on loan at Swindon.

"We’ll be sitting down with them and sorting things out next week."

Not only has Cooper not met many of his new players, he had never been to Gillingham before meeting the chairman last week.

He said: "It’s been a hard few weeks for me after leaving Hartlepool so I was quite surprised when I got a call from the chairman while I was on my way back to Scotland.

"So I turned around and came to Gillingham and was impressed with what I saw. It was my first visit and the whole set-up was great. It’s a superb stadium and the chairman is obviously ambitious."

Meanwhile, Cooper made an early statement of intent by saying he wants to take the Gills straight back to the Championship.

At his first press conference on Saturday, he said: "We have to have targets and promotion is our target. A lot of people will be hoping and expecting us to bounce straight back into the Championship and we will certainly be trying to do that.

"But I know from my experience that it’s a tough division and we’ll have to fight hard. A lot of teams will think, because we’ve just come down, that we’ll be on easy street and want to turn us over. We’ll have to guard against that."