"It was terrifying and thrilling all in the same breath!" - Town boss Millington reflects on his year

Twelve months ago, Millington was working alongside his mate Pete Wild as they plotted to maintain the club's place at the summit of the National League.

After losing in last season's play-offs, Millington replaced Wild as manager during a volatile summer, and has promotion back in his sights after steering the club away from the foot of the table.

How does the Town boss sum up such yo-yo year?

"Huge changes really," he said. "There's been a concerted effort to maintain as much consistency as possible and to maintain the heart and soul of the club as much as we can, and keep working in the same vein as we have for the last three seasons.

"There have been an awful lot of changes, on the playing staff more than anywhere else, and some of those characters we lost, some of the players' technical ability and tactical ability, were tough to replace.

"But it's led to us bringing in a new group who I think are now starting to show a similar type of spirit, endeavour and togetherness that we've had here over recent years, who've got their own identity in a football sense and are starting to carve their own legacy for the club hopefully."

Last season's side came heartbreakingly close to carving out their own piece of FC Halifax Town history before losing to Chesterfield in the play-offs.

"I definitely think we gave it everything but we finished fourth when we could have finished first in my mind," Millington said.

"I remember being away at Southend and us under-performing, a lacklustre performance, a poor defeat and I think Stockport's fine run had come to an end, I think they'd been beaten at Yeovil.

"All of a sudden, the complexion of the title race would have changed dramatically had we managed to win that game.

"A few us always had that dream we'd be going to Edgeley Park on the last day of the season playing for the title.

"There was a lot of talk around that time about how it had been a great season and we were talking in the past tense while the season was still going on, and that unsettled me a bit because I felt we were still in with a chance of winning the league.

"Of course we were up against big teams - Stockport, Wrexham, Notts County were on our coat tails - but possibly as a group and as a club our expectations should have been greater.

"Maybe we lacked a bit of ambition and I think that seeped in slightly to our run-in, in that we started talking about what a great season it had been before the season was over.

"We can't allow that to happen, we've got to be ambitious to go and win titles and win promotion and get up.

"The season's not over until the final whistle."

Two days after the final whistle against Chesterfield, Wild left The Shay to join Barrow. Two days after that, Millington was appointed as his successor.

"It was terrifying and thrilling all in the same breath really!" Millington reflected.

"Me and Pete have had a great working relationship and we get on very well.

"I knew Pete was ambitious, he wants to manage at the highest possible level and I can't fault him for that, it's a great ambition.

"There'd been interest in Pete throughout the season from various clubs and various rumours, so we knew at some point he was going to want to move, and that was accepted in my mind.

"For me, we'd built up a bedrock at a fantastic club in Halifax, we'd built some great relationships with people.

"The relationship with the chairman for the management team is the most important, but there were great relationships across the club.

"We're a small, tight team and none of us are doing it for the financial gain, we're all doing it for the love of the club and the love of the job.

"There are some fantastic people, and I just felt we had unfinished business and we've got to achieve something with the club.

"It's great to talk about pulling the club together and starting to drive in a direction and starting to implement an identity on the pitch and what have you, that's all positive work, but the ultimate aim is to win cups, win promotion and be successful on the field.

"We slightly fell short (last season) by finishing fourth and the season tailing off a bit at the end, especially with the play-off game."

Millington faced a baptism of fire in the role, tasked with rebuilding a squad shorn of several key players who departed, topped off with Jamie Allen's headline-grabbing decision to appear on Love Island.

"Our family summer holiday was a day trip to London!," Millington said.

"I had my phone turned off for about eight hours, either side of which was fielding phone calls from agents and dealing with issues within the squad.

"There was no downtime, there's an awful lot of time spent on the phone, an awful lot of time spent on the computer, an awful lot of time spent in the car travelling round meeting players and trying to persuade people to come to Halifax Town.

"There was an awful lot to do immediately, that's the commitment you make.

"It's an intense job and you know the demands.

"We did feel as a management team that we had experience between me, Pogsy, Andy Cooper and Sarg, we had experience of this level and other levels, and we all felt it was an unusually challenging period, the first couple of months.

"There were some unusual challenges thrown in, some well known, some less well known.

"Part of the thrill and the motivation is the care for the club that we've all got.

"We wanted to get it absolutely right and try to get the foundation in place.

"We believed we were doing everything we could do get that right to kick on at the very start of the season."

That wasn't how it panned out. Far from it.

An underwhelming opening day defeat at Barnet set the tone for a disastrous first two months of the campaign, after which Town were bottom of the table.

"There were so many challenges, and they were coming thick and fast," Millington said.

"People know us well enough to know we do have a structure and a plan in place, and you commit to those.

"We went into them absolutely certain we were doing things as best as we could and trying to push everything in the right direction.

"But as the results are failing to come, you can't help but continue to question those plans, question what you're doing, possibly over-think in some cases whether things are moving in the right direction.

"So the level of analysis for what you're doing just goes through the roof.

"You want to put things right and start getting the results as soon as possible.

"We did make certain changes, we did tweak certain things to how we worked.

"I think that took some courage on the part of the staff because we could easily have just blindly gone down the same old road, more in hope than expectation.

"But if we believe in the processes we implement and it throws things up as not being right, then we have to be willing to be flexible and adapt, and I think that was a key part of the process to help us start getting more positive results.

"Massively challenging, but it's a fantastic learning curve because these are the things that will come up, to some degree, over and over again throughout my time as Halifax manager.

"I think there'll be occasions where things don't quite go as we planned and where we didn't expect certain outcomes, and it's having the courage and the faith in the staff and the processes we go through to be able to recognise that, and the confidence to change and adapt when required.

"Hopefully some of that learning has taken place and hopefully some of that has stuck in my brain so that next time we face any kind of similar scenarios, I and we as a team have got the ability to react quickly."

Three days after Halifax's 4-0 home humbling by Woking, the turning point of the season arrived with a 1-0 win against York.

But Millington feels it's too simplistic to view Town direction of travel earlier this season as a sudden transformation from one extreme to the other.

"I think it was an evolution because I think there were certain results that were incredibly painful and unforeseen, ie Aldershot away and Woking at home," he said.

"I know there were others we weren't happy with, but they were the two that were the real catalysts for change.

"In between those two, we'd gone away to Eastleigh and been really unfortunate not to at least get something, in my mind we probably should have won.

"We conceded off the counter-attack from a missed penalty and lost 1-0, but had we won that game, maybe we'd have gone into the Woking game a bit better and maybe we'd have scraped something.

"We might have been worse off because might have fumbled through the next few games.

"But those two results were the two in particular that led to us tweaking the formation, they led to us looking at the levels of energy we had on the pitch and how we could gain a bit more energy.

"We felt there was a fragility within the squad, so when we went a goal down there was a lack of belief we could get anything out of the game, so we looked for a resilience and we wanted to make sure the players had an absolute understanding that, regardless of what went on in the game, they were to maintain clear focus on what we were trying to achieve in terms of the method and the style of play.

"I think that narrow-focused everybody into making sure that those were the things we tried to achieve."

Millington says what Halifax have gone through already this season will form the basis for how they approach the new year.

And when asked what he hopes 2023 will hold for The Shaymen, he said: "More of what the second quarter of the season has produced.

"Clearly results are the main objective, but within that we want to achieve those results with performances that deserve them.

"We want to be maintaining and building on what's now a good home record, we want The Shay to be a place that people come and don't expect to get anything from.

"We want to continue that vein of form that the players have built up.

"Away from home I want us to start picking up more points.

"We've had some decent away performances, but I mentioned Eastleigh last season where we played quite well for an away performance but came away with nothing, in more recent weeks we had a similar experience at Yeovil, where the least we deserved was a draw and I'd argue we could have nicked it, but again, we came away with nothing.

"Bromley away, 1-1, Maidstone away, 1-1, these are the games we want to be winning.

"So there are a number of areas we want to improve over the second-half of the season, but we can't take our eye off the ball and neglect the areas of performance that have improved.

"In particular, our home form is something we've got to maintain, and if we can, build on.

"But the big message for me is that we do not think that, because we've had a reasonable run of performances over the last 10 or 11 games, we think we've cracked it.

"Whether that's the players, the staff, the club, the fans. It's vital we retain an element of humility that was served up for us in such large portions in the first 10 or 11 games.

"We've got to remember that if we take our eye off the ball, we're quickly punished and put back in our place in this division, so we've got to retain that humility and be as committed as we have been in each game to go and get three points.

"So that's the big hope for ne in 2023, that we really learn the lessons from the first 10 or 11 games of the season."