FC Halifax Town: “I feel like I’m going to start coming into the best years of my career” says defender Byrne

One of the last signings of the close season, Byrne has started every game this season for The Shaymen, nearly all of them on the right of the back three.

Town’s 3-4-1-2 system encourages all the back three, but especially Byrne and left-sided centre-half Tom Bradbury, to move out of defence with the ball and start attacks, something Byrne embraces.

“From the moment I got permission to speak to them, the trust they instilled in me was nice,” he said.

“I probably needed some time to get fit because I wasn’t doing much training with Fylde, I had a niggle, but the gaffer and Milly (Chris Millington) said ‘we know what you can do, we know we need to get you fit and it’s up to you to work with us and we’ll work with you, but we’ll get you there’.

“They tried to give me that confidence in that they knew what position I could play, and it was just the confidence they gave me about being able to come out with the ball.

“It’s what you want from a manager - ‘express yourself’ - ‘we’re telling you to come out with the ball, and if you lose it, that’s on us’.

“As a player, you know that if something the manager is asking you to do doesn’t come off, and he’s saying ‘that’s what I want you to do, that’s on me’, that gives everyone a lot of confidence.
“That’s something I’ve noticed from them. If I’m trying to come out with the ball or thread a ball, and it doesn’t come off, it’s not effing and blinding on the sidelines saying ‘what are you doing’, it’s ‘we understand it will come. we know you can do it, and you’re not going to get it right every time’.

“That trust and support they give you does give you confidence as a player and makes you want to go out and perform well for them.”

Byrne has been given licence to play out from the back at previous clubs, and sees the benefits playing three at the back can bring.

“At Macclesfield, we had that a little bit, the manager wanted you to play. And Fylde was a very footballing environment, Dave Challinor wanted us to play a lot of football,” he said.

“You’re not protected as much with your two midfielders right in-front of you and your full-backs beside you, it’s a bit more open, but when you can get that right, get your wing-backs pushed on and your wide centre-halves coming out with the ball, you can cause a lot of problems.

“There’s different aspects of it, you have to get it wide more and probably have more one v one defending, but we can all probably play in different positions - Tom could play in the middle, I could play in the middle, Naz could play out wide, you’ve got Clarkey who has bundles and bundles of experience.

“Jay Benn is doing well in training as well, so there’s competition for places and it’s working well at the moment.”

Byrne played for his local team in Portmarnock, on the east coast of Ireland, before joining Belvedere, which is an inner city club in Dublin which is well-known for moving players across to England and has a strong youth set-up.

“That was when I was 11 or 12 and I played there for the next four years,” he said.

“Through them I got into the Irish youth teams and went on trials at a couple of places, and ended up signing for Nottingham Forest when I was 15.

“In my first year, my parents wanted me to do my exams so I travelled over on Thursdays to England and travelled back on Saturdays.
“That bedded me in and helped me understand what it was like in England, and in my second year I was already settled in.

“My brother was over in England when he was younger but he didn’t take to it and he was homesick.
“But I never really felt homesick.”I enjoyed my time at Forest, I met a lot of good people and it was a good education on how football should be played.”

But his time at Forest came to an unexpected end.

“I came back for pre-season, Steve McClaren was the manager, and I was meant to go out on loan, Southend came in to take me on loan,” Byrne said.

“He’d said I wasn’t ready, which at the time I thought ‘I am ready’ but looking back I 100 per cent wasn’t ready, I was nowhere near ready.

“He just said ‘keep doing what you’re doing, go away on international duty, come back and we’ll re-evaluate but we’ll look to give you a new contract’.

“So I was happy, training with the first-team every day, understanding what men’s football was about.

“By the time I came back from international duty he’d left by mutual consent and Steve Cotterill came in, and he released four or five of us after five days.

“That’s football. At the time I found it hard to take and thought it was unfair, but as you grow older you find out that’s the nature of the game, some people have different opinions and different managers want different players.”

Byrne then joined Rochdale, but things were no more stable there.

“Steve Eyre was the manager. I’d played against him once or twice, he used to be Manchester City’s youth team manager, and we beat them in the FA Youth Cup and I think I scored and had a good game,” Byrne said.

“He came in for me straight away, I played a friendly with them and he gave me a contract.

“I moved up to Manchester. I signed for him on the Friday and he got sacked on the Monday, so I had a really unlucky spell in the space of a month.

“I went on loan from Rochdale to Southport, and the manager there, Liam Watson, was very good for me.

“I played every game I could for Southport. He left in the summer, Southport offered me a contract and so did Telford, where Liam had gone.
“Southport were in the Conference and Telford were in the Conference North, but a lot of the lads went down (to Telford) with Liam, I had a lot of trust in him and he wanted to put a lot of trust in me.

“Even though it was at a lower level, I just thought I needed to get some games, and I knew under Liam I’d play game after game.

“He stuck by me, we won the league that year but I’m sure throughout that season he could have dropped me because I was a young lad, I was probably making mistakes that I shouldn’t have been making.

“I still speak to him every couple of weeks and I owe him a lot for giving me a chance to play so many games.”

But Byrne couldn’t turn down the chance to move up to the fifth tier with Macclesfield.

“John Askey was the manager. I wanted to get back into full-time football,” he said.

“We were training two or three times a week, sometimes in a morning, sometimes at night, and I wanted to get back into the routine of full-time football.

“I thought, to be able to build on my craft, I had to jump at the opportunity to go full-time.

“We had some good times, I got to the FA Trophy final, finished just outside the play-offs.

“John was a great manager, and Steve Watson was his assistant.”

And Byrne would soon link up with Watson again at Gateshead.

“They’d finished well the year before,” he said. “They had a strong squad, and I’d known of him being able to build a good team of men.

“I wanted to go and play under him, with the career he had, and I said to myself ‘I’m sure I can learn’.

“He left for Port Vale soon afterwards and Steve Watson came up, which was good because we knew each other.
“I played every game. I think he wanted to keep me and I was open to the idea but there was a lot of stuff going on towards the end of the season with Gateshead.

“I thought to myself ‘I have to leave’ really.”

There then followed two hugely contrasting seasons at Fylde for the Irishman.

“Everyone wanted to be there, it was a club on the up, lovely stadium and facilities, had just finished in the play-offs,” he said.

“I knew of the manager through someone, what his style of play was like and what he was like as a manager.

“We had a great season, a great squad, great morale.

“We stayed in the FA Cup for so long and had such a build-up of fixtures, whether that affected our league status I don’t know, but we went on to win the FA Trophy.

“We just missed out in the play-off final. We’d beaten Salford two weeks before in the league, and never felt they caused us too many problems, but they turned up in the final and we probably didn’t.”

A year later, Fylde were relegated.

When asked what went wrong, Byrne said: “I felt like we had a good core of a team there, a good back five, a really strong squad.

“We lost a lot of players. The year Leyton Orient went up, they finished strongly the year before and they kept their squad together, Barrow finished OK the year before and kept their squad together.

“I always think that helps but for one reason or another, we ended up losing our left-back, a central midfielder, and maybe we just didn’t gel enough in time, and in football, if you get into a bit of a rut, it’s very similar if you keep winning, you get confident and everything falls for you.

“We got into a rut of losing games, and you need something to get out of it but for some reason, we couldn’t get out of it.

“Just before lockdown, we drew one and won two and we thought ‘this is the turning point for us’, but then lockdown hit.

“It was something I didn’t want on my CV. There was nothing we could do as players but blame ourselves for the start we had.

“It’s a regret that we got Fylde relegated.”

Byrne says there were “three or four” clubs interested in him over the summer.

“Halifax finished in the play-offs last year, I spoke to Pete and Milly, and Sarg (Joe Sargison, first-team coach), and I liked the idea of what they wanted to do, the style of play they wanted to implement, and the vision the manager has, it really lures you in in terms of the dedication and the work he and Milly and Sarg do, they really put in the hours,” he said.

“When you see a manager like that, you think ‘well, if he’s putting in that many hours, he’s doing that in terms of me’.
“We went through a lot of my strengths and what he thought I could do for the squad.

“I knew one of my good friends Luke Summerield had signed and he had only good things to say about the club.

“It was an easy enough decision.

“When we sat down and spoke, I could see straight away it wasn’t like a phone call and them saying ‘we’d like to have you’, it was going through everything they’d seen in me, clips they had of me and the style of play they wanted.

“They really had an identity they wanted to bring across and they left no page unturned, they had everything written down.

“It was quite interesting to sit there and listen at how far they went into it. And nice to see that someone had put that much effort into what they feel the squad could do.”

Byrne feels he is now coming into the prime of his career.

“I’m still young, I’m only 27, I feel fit and athletic,” he said.

“I’m understanding the game well now, with experience.

“I’ve got age on my side but I’ve also got experience on my side.

“Over the years I’ve come up against a lot of different strikers so you know different players, it’s just knowing how to combat them.

“I feel like I’m going to start coming into the best years of my career.

“I’ve still got a lot to improve on but I want to keep improving, keep getting better, and keep putting in good performances.”

For all his involvement in building attacks and playing out from the back, Byrne’s main passion remains keeping the ball out of the net.

“I love defending, I like to play football, I like to come out with the ball and pass it, try and do what a modern centre-half should do,” he said, “but we’ve got midfielders and wing-backs who are better on the ball than me so what I need to do is make sure I do my job first, and that’s defending, stopping goals going in and winning our battles.

“Then when we do score a goal, make sure it’s a victory.

“Our job as defenders is to keep the ball out of the net. It’s a bonus if we can come out with the ball, like you’ve seen Tom (Bradbury) do lately.

“But we all know our main job is to stop balls going in.”