"I was immensely proud of that group" - Billy Heath on joining Halifax, building his squad and his first season at Town

"The playing side of it when I walked in was a mess."

Billy Heath had just achieved the impossible by guiding North Ferriby into the Conference Premier.

Then, in the summer of 2016, he was tasked with doing it all over again at FC Halifax Town.

The Shaymen had just been relegated and then won the FA Trophy at Wembley for the first time in their history.

Two days after that historic achievement, Heath was appointed as their manager, replacing Jim Harvey.

"I thought there'd be an approach coming but nothing was signed or sealed before we won promotion," recalls Heath, who says he was first aware of Halifax's interest in him a few months earlier.

"I think David (Bosomworth, Town chairman) was panicking because, with us getting promoted, he wanted us to come in.

"We'd heard rumours he wanted us to come in but I think David thought we were going to change our mind when we got promoted.

"David probably looked and said 'who's at the top in the Conference North, who's getting the results?'

"I don't think David particularly liked our style of football, if I'm honest.

"But he knew we were his best option.

"People might say 'you arrogant so-and-so' but that was a fact. Ferriby were third from bottom when we took over."

Heath had already masterminded one transformation, taking what was effectively a village team in North Ferriby to Wembley twice in two years, and winning the FA Trophy and promotion.

Another rebuilding job awaited him at The Shay.

"I'd had conversations with the owners at Ferriby about what it would look like going into the Conference," Heath says.

"I had my views on what it needed on the financial side but also the structural side.

"Halifax had made an approach and I said to the owners that I wanted to talk to Halifax.

"Once you do that, it's very, very difficult to stay at the club you're already with.

"Once I spoke to David and we had a chat, then it happened very quickly because I said to David 'it needs to happen' because I knew what state the club was in.

"It had just been relegated and I knew there weren't many players left.

"When I walked into the club, I think we had four players signed on.

"Matty Brown was injured, which wasn't a short-term fix, they had another one injured as well, Kevin Roberts was on contract.

"So time is obviously of the essence, and we needed to get to work really fast.

"The playing side of it when I walked in was a mess.

"Matty Brown played in the Trophy final injured and it killed him for the start of the season, and who was picking up that tab? I was."

In rebuilding The Shaymen, Heath decided to use many of the same materials he'd used at North Ferriby, bringing Tom Denton, Tom Nicholson, Nathan Hotte, Liam King, Danny Hone and Josh Wilde with him from that promotion-winning side.

"David always has to have input, and he was very forthcoming that season," says Heath.

"The remit when we sat down was we've got two seasons to get back into the Conference.

"I gave a list of players to David and there were six, seven, eight players from Ferriby there and we managed to get most of them.

"We got criticised fot that, but these boys were serial winners.

"Adding to Matty Brown, Kevin Roberts and Richard Peniket, you were adding serial winners.

"All they did was win. And everybody knows, I only take a certain type of player, they have to be of a certain mindset, a certain character and they have to be decent people.

"You have to buy into what we're doing, what we want, and I said to David 'there's the players we want'.

"We got Matty Kosylo, who was a bit of stardust, we got Jordan Sinnott, but the boys who came from Ferriby were serial winners.

"Whether parts of the fanbase liked that, and they expected us to bring in a bit more flair players - we were never going to do that under me.

"Because of the way we'd won things before, I wouldn't walk into Halifax and change what I was doing because people expected me to."

As well as half his Ferriby team, Heath also brought with him the style of play that was central to the success he'd achieved on Humberside.

"I said to David 'you do realise there are a lot of big clubs that have stayed in this division?'," Heath recalls.

"Stockport had been in the Conference North for ten years.

"And if you don't get out quickly, you can get stuck.

"I said to David 'forget about the entitlement, forget about it being a big club and we shouldn't be here, I don't want to hear another word about we shouldn't be here or we're too good for this league, the only way we're going to get out of it is by getting these players in, everybody pulling in the right direction and, no matter what it looks like or feels like, all we're here for is to get out of this league, and how we do it is irrelevant'.

"Everything now is about what things look like on the surface, and people are getting away with murder in football, they're charlatans and they're duping people.

"All our job is as managers is to win, that's it.

"You'll never get promoted out of certain leagues if you want to play a hugely passing, expansive game, unless you have the best players in the league.

"We needed to hit the ground running and David delivered the players we wanted.

"And we didn't do it in two years, we did it in nine months."

Heath discovered it wasn't just the playing staff that needed rebuilding at the club.

"When I took over, we had half a pitch with the rugby club training on the other half," he recalls.

"Tom Denton nearly got taken out by a rugby ball. They might have thought he was a post!

"But you'd be training and a rugby ball would land on you.

"But it wasn't a problem. If you had the right mentality, it's not a problem."

Heath says it was vital that the right people were in place at the club at the start of the 2016-17 season for the battle ahead.

"The first thing we did at Halifax was surround ourselves with good people, people who knew how to win," he says.

"We knew their characters inside-out, we knew how hard they'd fight for us, we knew they'd fight for each other.

"I knew they wanted to win for Halifax, for me, for Bob, for Elvis the physio, for Martin the kit man, for Shaun, and more importantly, they wanted to win for themselves.

"That group had a tremendous desire and will-to-win.

"They came across a lot of adversity but we never moaned about that.

"That group, and all the backroom staff, it was a real team.

"People with fantastic ability, like Jordan Sinnott, he had to work as hard as anybody else.

"He told me he'd never worked as hard as he did for us, but he knew if he didn't, he wouldn't play.

"He used to do this thing in training where he's stand on the edge of one box and the lads would put a round disc on the edge of the other box and the amount of times he'd drop a ball onto that disc.

"The players would love it. He could do stuff like that, but he was told if you don't compete, if you don't fight, if you're not going to tackle, you're not going ot play.

"I was immensely proud of that group and what they did, and they were an amazing bunch."

Denton became the first Halifax player to score a hat-trick on his debut when Town beat Nuneaton 3-2 on the opening day, with The Shaymen winning ten of their first 16 games before their form slumped alarmingly towards the end of 2016.

"Sometimes, a section of the crowd is very vocal at Halifax and can be very unforgiving," Heath says.

"A lot of them were fantastic, but I think some of the players struggled with that at times.

"I think the majority of the time, they were very, very good.

"There was a section that was difficult, because of the expectation and thinking 'why are we in this league?'

"But we were in that league because that's where we deserved to be.

"The fanbase was fantastic. It's like any big club, when things aren't going great, they'll let you know.

"I think we were around 11th at Christmas, but you don't panic.

"We just knew some of them (players) were struggling with the environment, which was slightly hostile at times."

Never more so than at the nadir of Town's season - a 1-0 loss at Stalybridge on Saturday, January 7.

The defeat, against a team who had won just three of their 23 league games, extended Halifax's winless run to nine and left their season hanging in the balance.

"I think we had something like 22 efforts on goal, I think we hit the crossbar three times, hit the post twice, missed a penalty," Heath recalls.

"Got beat 1-0 and obviously there's a lot of people disgruntled, David looked shell-shocked after the game.

"Before I got in there (the changing room), the players had already started talking. They weren't quiet and looking at their shoes, they were digging each other out, asking questions of each other.

"I added to that, and said 'we get a siege mentality'.

"I know it might sound cliched, but that's what we did. We put the barriers down, pulled up the drawbridge and became a siege mentality.

"Us against everybody.

"We said 'right, this is it now, we know what we've got to do, we have to get in the play-offs'.

"The pressure was on but the run we went on then, we found a way in a lot of games."

When asked if Bosomworth gave him any assurances over his future at that time, Heath says: "You don't want his backing because then you know you're in trouble.

"You'd rather him not say anything, and he didn't. He didn't need to say anything.

"David was David, I knew I was under pressure, the team knew I was under pressure, but that's where you want the players to come to the front then.

"They knew the pressure was building on themselves but they knew the pressure was building on me and Bob (Mark Carroll, assistant manager).

"Then we managed to construct some results and the rest is history."

The second part of our in-depth interview with Billy Heath will be on the Courier website next week.