"I don't know if there's a scenario that we haven't been through" - Chris Millington and Andy Cooper on their three years together at FC Halifax Town

The next three weeks could be the culmination of three years of work from Chris Millington and Andy Cooper.

It was in May 2022, when Millington had taken over from Pete Wild as Halifax manager, that discussions took place between him and Cooper about becoming his assistant.

The pair chatted over Zoom, and talked throughout June before Cooper had his first day in the job on the club's testing day on June 30.

"We first met at St George's Park but I didn't remember it until Joe Sargison (first-team coach) made the introduction when I was talking to him about taking over as manager and the traits and skills a good assistant would have," Millington recalls.

"Coops was the stand-out person straight away, which is when we properly met, but we had met previously on a coaching course at St George's."

"The course was in 2013, I remember that," says Cooper.

"But when we met on Zoom, I remember Milly going 'I remember, we were on the same course!' because of my Qatar connections, which are quite unusual.

"I'd known about the work going on at Halifax through Sarg and was going to pop into training on a couple of occasions and have a look what was going on.

"Then the opportunity to speak to Milly that summer presented itself.

"The stage I was at was wanting the cut and thrust of a first-team environment and battling for three points.

"I'd done 15, 17 seasons in youth football so I was looking to make the move to first-team football.

"I felt it was a really good fit."

"The fact that Sarg was a mutual, valued friend of both us carried a lot of weight," Millington says, "because we both think a lot of Sarg, so anybody that comes with his recommendation immediately has credit in the bank with both of us.

"But Coops was immediately the right fit.

"It was making sure really that Halifax was the right fit for him because obviously going from working in Qatar and Leeds United, Halifax Town's a very different type of environment.

"So it was making sure Coops understood what he was coming into wasn't the same environment, but better in some respects because it's the cut and thrust of first-team football and the National League is relentless.

"It's exciting but there are certain constraints and challenges you have to get your head round and operate in."

Millington says those constraints and challenges mean The Shaymen don't operate in the same way as most other professional football teams.

"Pretty much every manager you chat to after games in the National League will compare notes and situations and environments," he says.

"The lads come in, we train and then they go home, which is a full-time training programme but it ain't a full-time, professional set-up.

"Most clubs are arriving and the players get breakfast, they have team meetings in meeting rooms that have the resources to be able to present effectively.

"Some will have kit managers who do the laundry and look after the lads' training kit, they'll stay after training and eat and some will have gym and second sessions in the afternoon as well as team meetings.

"Our lads come in, they train and go home, which is partly down to the facilities and the resources we've got.

"The biggest challenge we have is the level of staffing.

"When you look across the other clubs, we've got three full-time members of football staff and the rest are part-time or session rate coaches.

"There's me, Coops and Aaron Scholes (physio) who are full-time on the football side and evryone else is either part-time or session rate.

"We lean on interns a lot too. In most clubs they come in just to get the experience and be around it, but we bring interns in because we need the man power and we need them to carry some of the load.

"So it is very challenging from that perspective and we know there are a lot of teams in the division beow who operate with greater resources and greater man power than we do.

"We don't want sympathy but it's nice people understand what we're up against and it maybe puts some of the success in a different light."

"Yeah, we don't want sympathy," says Cooper, "but just an understanding around the environment we operate in.

"I think I'd be one of the few full-time assistants in the league that would also have other sources of income to supplement it.

"It's a challenge getting the balance right and while we might limited in certain areas, the people we have are commited to what we're doing.

"We don't have a high turnover of staff because they buy into what we're doing and completely commit to the cause.

"We have to do what it says beyond the job description, which is like a lot of jobs I guess, but it does mean time can be taken away from tasks around the detail of training, the detail of opposition analysis and the details of recruitment."

The unique circumstances of life at Halifax have seen Millington and Cooper forge a close working relationship, partly through both having an amiable, affable nature but also due to three years' worth of ups and downs.

"I don't know if there's a scenario that we haven't been through," says Cooper, "because we've had incredible highs through adversity, we've had really challenging moments through form, player sales or the stadium and the pitch and having to relocate.

"We've had a number of things thrown at us but it brings you together and galvanises you more.

"There's definitely periods where we've had to pick each other up and times where I need to be more vocal and speak up.

"And there'll be dark moments where Milly steps up and leads the staff and the players and we get back on track.

"When you go through all these things, you've got be able to say what you feel and we've got a relationship now where we can do that.

"There's never a moment where there's a lull in the season either.

"If you've done six Saturday, Tuesdays in a row and then you don't have one, rather than a bit of time off it's then workig on recruitment or retaining players, getting out to a National League North game on a Tuesday night.

"There's always stuff to keep each other going, but it's all been forged out of more challenging moments and the bigger, better moments like two play-off finishes and the Wembley win are the reward, although they sometimes feel more like relief than pure joy."

"We know we're both looking at things from the same point of view," sys Millington. "First and foremost, we both want the team to be successful, and every decision brings us back to that objective.

"The good thing then is we've got slightly differing views of how we make that happen but the trust is there to be honest anout what we think we need to do.

"I've got to make the final decision but there's many occasions when I'll defer to Coops' greater knowledge and wisdom, but ultimately I know that if he's putting in an opinion or a plan, it's well thought through and it's for the greater good of the team as opposed to anything motivated by ego.

"Which I don't think can be said across the league for management teams, but that carries through to other members of our staff too, who are all playing it the same way."

Occasionally Millington will instigate a communication embargo, immediately after a Saturday match if Town have a game-free weekend round the corner, to allow uninterrupted time with family and the chance to switch off.

"On our board at the training ground, we'll constantly revisit three things as a staff, which are energy, organisation and resilience," says Cooper.

"They're our three main values we live by.

"Energy isn't running up and down the touchline, it's energy in training, on the pitch and that transferring to the lads.

"I think we're known as a team that is energetic and hard-working, and competitive to the end.

"I'd suggest we're one of the most organised sides, which our record without the ball shows, and I think we've also shown a lot of resilience to challenging moments on and off the pitch, whether that's form or coming up against teams with more resources and bigger budgets, or off pitch distractions."

The partnership was tested like never before back in September, when Millington was taken ill and needed time off for surgery in hospital, leaving Cooper to take the reins.

"When the call initially came in after the Eastleigh game, we didn't know the severity of it," Cooper recalls.

"It could have been a long period of absence.

"When I first got the role (as assistant manaer), I took some advice from a really good, established EFL assistant manager, and he always has a cardboard box in his boot or at the training ground because things can happen so quickly in football.

"And he said to always be ready if something happens to the manager, if they can't get to a game or they get taken ill, are you ready?

"I've sometimes thought 'if something happens, are you ready to step up?' and you just have to be in those situations.

"We were all worried about what was going to happen but the real positive of him coming back too early was his presence.

"We won at Maidenhead and then I still take on my shoulders the poor performance at Braintree.

"The home games against Wealdstone and Tamworth, we played well and got a draw and a win, but Milly's presence on the touchline in the second-half just have everyone a lift that he was back around it.

"I knew he was struggling at that time, there certainly wasn't the same animation from him on the touchline or in the changing room.

"But the staff stepped up and senior players like Sam Johnson and, at the time, Billy Waters, reached out and said 'whatever you need, we'll do it'.

"Steve Nichol dropped everything to step up and support what we were doing."

"I came back way too soon," Millington reflects, "against doctors' advice and what have you, so I guess in some respects it was difficult to sit and do nothing.

"But it wasn't as difficult as you might imagine because I know Coops' qualities and abilities to identify where he needs to step in or step back, he's really intuitive in those situations.

"So when he needed to step forward and be the main leader, I had no concerns about that.

"And from a football perspective, his awareness and his ability is second to none.

"The difficult part for me was that, we're already overworked and have too much to do, so being a man down is incredibly difficult.

"So I wanted to get back as quickly as possible to carry my share of the burden.

"I was at the end of the phone at all times to share my opnion, but ultimately it was up to Coops to make thefinal decision, and I backed him whichever way he chose to go.

"It was a unique situation, and it highlighted how important it is to have good people around you because you don't know when things like that will occur.

"Had I not had Coops, Pogs (Paul Oakes), Jack (Drewery) and others around, it could have been catastrophic, but it was almost seamless."

The pair experienced two very different ends to the season in 2023 and 2024, having won the FA Trophy at Wembley in their first campaign and losing at Solihull Moors in the play-offs last term.

Would another play-off defeat this season leave them wondering if they'd taken the club as far as they can?

"That might be the way others see it, we've been here three years and we've not had any discussions about re-signing contracts, so it might be a question for others before we have that decision to make," Millington says.

"You're always looking at 'are we maximising everything at our disposal?' and the signs that we probably are would be points-per-pound-spent, I think we'd be top of the league by some distance for that.

"Points-per-pound-spent on the football staff, we'd be top of the league by some distance.

"Points-per-pound-earned from players we've recruited for nothing and sold for, even in the last 12 months, hundreds of thousands of pounds.

"So if you look at the points we're earning given the resources at our disposal, then we continue to be highly successful.

"Ultimately, no-one cares about that, what they're interested in is 'can we get promoted?'.

"We expect to progress, our expectation is we go to Oldham with a thorough game-plan and what we might lack in experience and physicality, we believe we make up for in athleticism and energy, and a tactical game-plan.

"We expect to go there and win, but if we didn't make it to League Two this season, I think we'd still look at the season as a whole as a success and maybe bemoan the fact we lost so many significant players and wonder if it would have been different had we kept just two or three of those fit.

"Because of the way we have to operate, it isn't just a case of going out and buying a title-winning squad next season.

"We can't do that, that isn't possible, so we have to look at how we develop the current squad and maintain a competitive element whilst developing players and losing out of contract players as well as players we sell every transfer window.

"These are the realities of Halifax Town at the moment and they're the challenges we've got to overcome to remain competitive.

"As I've said before, if we were strong enough off-the-field to retain the likes of Jesse Debrah, Jack Senior, Milli Alli, Kane Thompson-Sommers, Andrew Oluwabori, Jamie Stott and Tylor Golden for an extra 18 months or two years, then we'd be challenging to win the title.

"But that's something we've got to get right off-the-pitch and I don't have the influence over that, nor do I want any, I want to be in control of the football side.

"But that ability to progress the club probably needs a bit of focus and a bit of energy, to be able to retain players who are out of contract and hold onto players when offers come in for them, just a bit longer.

"We're going to have that same issue again this summer,there'll e a lot of very good players we'll be at risk of losing and we'll have to start that cycle all over again.

"So the question really is, if we don't go up, have we got it in us to begin that cycle all over again and have the fans got the patience to stay with us while we try and complete the cycle?"

Cooper says the most pleasing part of the job is seeing players develop, something that is an annual requirement at Town due to the turnover of players.

"They usually come in without much of a fanfare when they're announced, they're relatively unknown," he says.

"It's part of the learning process for the lads to develop and get better, and there's a lot of examples of these types of players becoming fans' favourites and really contributing to the club than there are not having the impact we think they can.

"There's a cycle here that's been going on from before my time at the club that it takes time to build, and every year you're trying to add on to what you've already established, while understanding that you can't always hold onto these players for long enough.

"You start each season knowing pre-season might be difficult but that we'll get stronger, and that was the case until ten games or so ago, when we lost so many players in quick succession, which meant we had to change course with the amount of players we had to bring in."

Town are once again on the cusp of completing that cycle, with the next three weeks potentially offering the chance to finish what was started three years ago over Zoom.

"The third season here is always the best because you have to build over a longer period because of the constraints and the challenges," says Millington.

"The disappointment for us is getting so many injuries at the point we did in what should be our most successful season.

"But we're very fortunate in the players we've been able to bring in and we're starting to see how they fit together and how they can best achieve what we want them to as a unit.

"So it is a culmination of a lot of work in terms of recruitment, long-term planning and development.

"We've brought in players who haven't really played senior football and developed them, taught them about senior football, helped them understand how their skill set fits into playing first-team, senior football, and that takes time. It's not a quick fix.

"And it takes skill, it's not something every coach and manager can do, and it takes patience on behalf of the chairman.

"He provides an environment where we've got the time to build and develop, which is a crucial part of the process.

"So it is the culmination of three years' work, which makes it all the more important for us to make the most of the opportunity."