Town’s backroom team are keeping the plates spinning
THE PLATES are still spinning at FC Halifax Town, but at least now there are more hands keeping them going.
When Pete Wild and Chris Millington first arrived at the club in summer 2019, they had less than two weeks until the start of the season, and a backroom staff containing a goalkeeping coach, a kit man and a physio.
Despite that, The Shaymen made an incredible start to the season, racing to the top of the table, and eventually finished in the play-off places.Now, the backroom team has evolved and includes a first-team coach and head of recruitment, and sprouted different departments, including strength and conditioning, and video analysis, using specialised, qualified staff.
“The club was in good health when we came in,” says assistant manager Millington. “The chairman runs a tight ship, there are some really good departments within the club, and I think the previous manager had moved things on from the time when he came in to the time when he left.
“I think what we’ve tried to do is then look at what are our constraints, what are the things that are going to be a challenge for us, and how do we navigate a route round that to be able to do the things we want to do? So it was increasing our levels of fitness, make ourselves fitter in terms of the ability to run further, to cover more ground, and to be able to challenge the teams who were fit last year, which were the likes of Harrogate and Notts County. We looked at them and said ‘we’re not at those kind of levels and we need to be if we’re going to kick on’, so we looked at how we could improve that side of the football preparation without necessarily going to the chairman and asking for a great increase in the budget. We’ve been able to achieve that.
“There’s been a lot of work gone into the analysis side, through people coming in who are highly qualified to do the work and doing it to help move the club forward, they’ve done it out of a desire to improve what’s already here rather than a desire to earn a significant wage. These things have really helped.
“Last season, all of the coaching fell on mine and the gaffer’s shoulders, which is great because we’re both highlyqualified coaches, we love the coaching, love working with the players on the grass and both love that personal relationship you get when you’re trying to help a player and a team develop. What was a challenge was the amount of work that produced in terms of preparing a session, evaluating a session, thinking about individuals within the session, then thinking about oppositions and how well are we preparing the lads to face a specific opposition.
Millington says the devil is in the detail for Town’s backroom staff, whether it be analysing upcoming opponents or improving fitness.
“We’re constantly trying to maximise our potential but minimise the level of shock and surprise the opposition can throw at us,” he says. “What I mean by that is, we go through a thorough analysis process of the opposition, which means getting right under the skin of what they’ve been doing over a number of games in terms of the style of play, goal threat, defensive structure, team selections, threatening players, the ones who maybe offer us an opportunity to get in and use our strengths. Then you’ve got the lads looking at the strength and conditioning side, trying to build in a really thorough fitness programme into what’s already a busy training schedule and make sure we’re getting the right sort of fitness work into the lads without that leading to fatigue that undermines matchday performance. So there’s loads of plates spinning all at one time. There were three key objectives for us going into the season, and two of those are beginning to become part of our identity, and the third, which is around being really consistent in our defending, will help kick us on further if we can start to achieve that over the next few games.”
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