GREGOR ROBERTSON
Our guest columnist examines how Accrington Stanely are succeeding
IF I’M being brutally honest, during my playing career a visit to Accrington Stanley held about as much appeal as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Yes, the changing rooms are tiny – and freezing or sweltering depending on the season. The stadium is decrepit and, come winter, the pitch invariably turned into a swamp.
It wasn’t the nicest place to play football, but there was also a feeling that Stanley’s team of kids and cast-offs relished their status as League Two’s most unfashionable outfit.
They were always hungry, combative and talented, too, while the opposition didn’t always fancy being there. I don’t think my team ever left with more than a point.
Somewhere buried in that truth, perhaps, is a seed of the story blossoming in Lancashire this season, in which promotion to the third tier for the first time in Stanley’s history looks increasingly likely.
Ten wins and a draw in the last 12 games lifted them to within a point of leaders Luton ahead of their meeting at Kenilworth Road yesterday. As you read this, they may very well be top of the pile.
John Coleman, now in his 17th season as manager of Stanley, over two spells, received the League Two manager of the month award on Friday, but if he leads the club with the division’s second-smallest budget and average attendance to promotion he should be named manager of the year.
Coleman has always had the knack of finding steely characters of all ages and backgrounds who look beyond the surroundings to grasp an opportunity to play League football perhaps unavailable to them elsewhere.
Coleman and Accy have come close before, reaching the playoffs in 2010-11 and 2015-16, but, as Coleman told me recently, with the prudent investment and backing of Andy Holt, who bought the club in November 2015, “there’s never been a better time to manage or play for Accrington Stanley”. Holt has spent £2m upgrading facilities, including a new drainage system to improve that playing surface, while new seats, a lick of paint and a welcoming fan zone have been added to the Wham Stadium.
Stepping
There are plans, too, for a new stand to replace the corrugated iron ‘cow shed’, as Holt describes it, on one side of the pitch, and for a new training ground, too.
While Coleman remains happy for Stanley to act as a stepping-stone to bigger things, for many of his players in a squad with an average age of 24, the familiar mass exodus at the end of each season should thankfully now be a thing of the past.
The departure, in 2016, of Josh Windass and Matty Crooks to Rangers for next to nothing taught Holt a valuable lesson.
“I likened it to snakes and ladders,” he says. “No matter how far we climbed, we were always waiting to land on a snake. Any success was actually an enemy.”
The club can now afford to tie players to longer deals, so when Matty Pearson, Shay McCartan and Omar Beckles left for Barnsley, Bradford and Shrewsbury respectively in the summer, more than £750,000 filled Stanley’s coffers.
This season, strikers Billy Kee and Kayden Jackson, with 21 and 13 goals respectively, have taken the plaudits, but there is talent aplenty throughout Coleman’s squad.
Young loanee James Dunne, the 20-year-old Burnley centreback, and Callum Johnson, an athletic right-back equally as comfortable in midfield, who made his loan from Middlesbrough permanent in January, have earned rave reviews from regulars at the Wham Stadium.
And Coleman regularly speaks of the importance of experienced pros, like defender Mark Hughes, 31, and the talented midfielders Sean McConville, 29, and Scott Brown, 32, to guide them.
The ebullient Holt is doing his best to galvanise the wider community, too, handing out 1,200 free strips to eight-year-old school pupils last month to mark the 50th anniversary of Accy’s reformation in 1968.
And he insists on all players joining the fans in the Sports Bar after every home game, where £1-a-pint ‘Winners Hour’, to celebrate three points, has been a particularly welcome initiative.
Accy have always been a spirited club, of course, having twice been resurrected after going bust and resigning from the Football League. But, with the fear of keeping the wolf from the door now diminished somewhat, Holt and Coleman have encouraged the entire club to embrace and cultivate that spirit.
“We sat the players down on the first day of pre-season training,” Coleman says. “We said to them all, everybody involved, the kit man, physio, people who work in the club, ‘Listen, we’re all part of trying to win promotion. That’s got to be your dream, your aim’. It was my dream at the start but they’ve taken ownership of that dream.”
Holt agrees. “There’s a good feeling around the place,” he says. “When people can see a future and share in it, start to go with it, there is power in multiple people pulling in the right direction.”