“I’ve loved it, I think it’s a great club and a great town” - Pete Wild on his first year as FC Halifax Town boss

On Wednesday, July 24, 2019, less than two weeks before the start of the season, Pete Wild was unveiled as Jamie Fullarton’s successor. Inheritor of a half-built squad and a club without direction.

Almost exactly one year on, Wild’s team were edged out of the National League play-offs, losing 2-1 at Boreham Wood.

This is the story of Wild’s remarkable first year at The Shay.

“Somebody phoned me the Friday before (Fullarton’s departure, which happened on Monday, July 15) saying Jamie was looking for an assistant, so I was waiting for a phone call on the Monday morning from Jamie to go and have a chat about being the assistant,” Wild says.

“I was out of a job so I was desperate to get back into the game.

“Then I found out that Jamie had walked and it was like ‘right, well I want the job then’.

“On the Monday when it came out, I got hold of the chairman’s number, rang him and had a chat.

“Ten days later, a couple of interviews later, I was announced as the manager, so it was a really quick turnaround, but exciting because it was a job I really wanted.

“There was no presentation (during his interviews), the chairman didn’t want that. I think he’d been bamboozled with enough Powerpoints over the years, which suited me.

“I thought if it was about me talking then I generally had a chance because I could sell what I wanted to do.

“There was a lot of discussions, probably two two-hour interviews. I think we analysed everything out of everything.

“Because I’d had a bit of time after (leaving) Oldham, I knew targets-wise what I wanted to do, and I thought it would be quite easy to sell to him what I wanted to do.

“I always think, first and foremost, you’ve got to be able to work with the chairman, and he’s got to be able to work with you, and you can tell when you have a conversation and sit down with somebody and connect.

“I’m looking at him thinking ‘can I work with him?’ Yes.

“I’m looking at him thinking ‘is he thinking can he work with me?’”Let’s be honest about it, I was a massive gamble.

“But one thing on my side was that the chairman loves somebody who comes in, does well and moves on, so I knew that and bent my interview around ‘I know I’m not the finished article but look where I could be, look what we did at Oldham in such a short space of time and how we galvanised that club, it sounds like you’ve got similar problems here and we feel like we can galvanise your club’.

“When you come into these jobs, they’re normally, for want of a better word, a horror show.

“But this just wasn’t.”I was driving back with Chris (Millington) going ‘we’re missing something here, why has he walked, what’s happened here?’

“It was all really good, it had a lot of things in place, the only thing we didn’t have was bodies.

“The bodies we had were excellent, good lads, and were prepared to work hard and go for everything we wanted.

“I just couldn’t get my head round what the problem was.

“We knew we had to work quickly, we asked them to implement a few things for us until we could get a full squad together.

“Generally our first ‘right, this is how we want to do things this year’ was before Ebbsfleet (the opening game of the season).

“We started putting most of our things in place when we had a squad the night before Ebbsfleet.

“Because we tried to be as positive as we could and galvanise the squad, I think we got buy-in quite quickly and the players were just happy for things to settle down, chill out and know what they were up to.

“That helped us because the lads just got on board with it and we found our way together.”

Wild’s first month in charge packed in six games and five new signings. No wonder he describes it on reflection as “relentless”.

“We needed players in, then you have to get them verified by the chairman whether he’s happy with finances,” he says.

“We had to sort out the players we already had in the building, there was a couple of players who were disengaged because of what had gone on with the previous manager and weren’t keen on staying, so we had to make sure they were happy.

“It was literally 100 mile an hour, and probably didn’t stop for about a month.

“Then it chilled out a bit. But luckily enough we started by winning games, because if we hadn’t and I’d had all that on, stress levels would’ve been through the roof.

“Fair play to the chairman, he had said to me ‘you won’t be judged after five, 10 games, you’ll be judged after 20 games’ and we were top after 20 games.”

First up for Wild and Chris Millington, who was officially announced as assistant manager on August 3, was a friendly at, of all places, Oldham, which Town won 1-0.

“The chairman stuttered and mumbled to me and Chris for about 10 minutes around this game being against Oldham, and he said ‘I can cancel it if you want’ but we needed a game so I just went ‘go for it, it’ll be weird, but go for it’, recalls Wild.

“Me and Chris are really positive as people, we’re optimistic at the best of times.

“Our mission from the chairman was ‘keep us in the league and sort the turmoil out’.

“But we wanted a little bit more than that. We had the three targets, which were get to 50 points as quick as we can, can we stay in the top half as long as we can and can we break the play-offs?

“We achieved all three, we didn’t come out of the top half all season, so that ain’t bad.

“The third one would’ve been the icing on the cake and it was.

“Those targets were agreed by the players, they were happy to try and achieve them.

“I just kept going 10 games at a time, I just kept saying ‘if in 10 games’ time we’re still in and around it, we’ve got a chance here’.

“There were peaks and troughs across the season, which is probably why we need to do more next year, and why I probably need more freedom in the budget to bring that player in to boost the squad.

“But I didn’t have that wriggle room so I had to go with what we had, but sitting here now, I know I can make things better by doing more and having some wriggle room in the budget for when we do have a lull, to freshen the squad up.”

Wild had only 17 games as a first-team manager under his belt when he was appointed Town boss, so admits he has learned a great deal over the past 12 months.

“How long have you got? I honestly don’t mean this tongue-in-cheek, I’ve got a list a mile-long of what I’ve learned, what I need to do better, what I could do better, what I won’t do again,” he says.

“I’ve learned so much. I’m quite philosophical in the fact that I’ve only done 58 games as a manager, I’m nowhere near the finished article. I’ve got so much to learn.

“But one thing I am is honest, I get up every morning and try to do the best I can, try to learn from my mistakes and hopefully get better.

“I know I’ve got a lot to learn but I’d like to think that we’ve come so far in that 12 months that we’re slowly and surely getting there.”

Perhaps with a hint to his two caretaker-spells at Oldham, and why he didn’t stay there, Wild says he has revelled in the freedom and autonomy of his role at Town.

“Being left along to make mistakes,” he says when asked what he has enjoyed most as manager at The Shay. “One thing the chairman does is leaves you alone and lets you get on with it.

“He doesn’t ask you the team until it comes out at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.

“Being left to prove ourselves. If we’re good enough, it’s because we did alright. If we’re not good enough, it’ll be because of us.

“I can never say at this club that there’s interference that makes my job a problem.

“I knew the constraints when I signed up, I knew the budget was one of the lowest in the league, if not the lowest, I knew we had a hybrid model, I knew we trained in Leeds.

“So if I didn’t like it, I didn’t have to sign up. So I had to deal with it and get on with it but be judged on our ability to galvanise a team for Saturday afternoon.”

Scratch below the surface of Town’s top seven finish, and there are some dark moments, such as heavy defeats at Bromley and Stockport during a run of one win in 11 league games stretching from October 8 to Boxing Day.

“I didn’t expect us to do as well as we did, obviously,” says Wild.

“Every team in every division has a bad patch, but at Oldham it was all rosy in the garden, and when I started here, it was rosy in the garden.

“When we had that run of games without a win, I needed that, I needed to feel like that, because I hadn’t felt like that in all the time I’d been coaching at first-team level.

“It really opened my eyes and slapped me in the face if I’m honest.

“It was good for my development.

“I didn’t realise the lows would be so low, how low I’d feel when we weren’t winning.

“I was probably trying harder in that time to get things right, when what I should’ve been doing is staying calm and believing in what we did, instead of trying to analyse the bones out of everything when there wasn’t anything to analyse.

“We just had to stick at it and wait for us to come out the other side.

“With the highs, you’re then desperate for your next game, so all you do is bother about the next game.

“But with the lows, probably because I’m a young manager, the lows were brutal, because I took them personally.

“I don’t think I could’ve been any lower after Bromley and Stockport. But what it has taught me is that, actually, you only lost three points.

“There’s another game round the corner and there’s another chance to put it right.

“I’d like to think next year that I’ll have more of a level head around wins and losses, and try to make sure that every week, when the lads go out, I’ve done everything possible to make them ready for the game, amd if we don’t win, I’m safe in the knowledge I’ve done everything I can to produce a team to go out.

“And if I haven’t done enough then that’s my fault.”

Does Wild feel he is a better manager now that he was a year ago?

“It’s hard to describe what a better manager is, I feel like I’m more prepared than I was last year,” he says.

“I feel like I’ve learned a lot.”As long as you’re prepared and you’re ready and you know what you’re about, I think that’s the more important thing than being a good or bad manager.

“I don’t think you can describe what a good or bad manager is. I think you can describe traits of a good and bad manager, but what that actually is, is very hard to describe. It’s like what’s good luck and bad luck?”

Few could have predicted that Wild’s first year in charge would culminate in a play-off appearance, or that it would finish almost exactly one year on thanks to a four month enforced break.

But for Wild, 12 months at The Shay have only strengthened his determination and desire for success.

“I’ve loved it, I think it’s a great club and a great town. I’ve got a real affinity with everybody now and I’m just desperate to do well for the club,” he says.

“There’s some great people that work for the club and they’re great fans who have proved that with the money they’ve raised.

“I just want to do well for them, for their town and their football club.

“I hope that this club continues to move forward, I hope that we’ll have done a lot of work with the academy, to make that better and hopefully produce more of our own (players), I hope on the field we continue to progress, and that we’re known as a top-half of the table team instead of a middle-of-the-road or a bottom-half of the table team.

“Come the start of the season, all points are wiped clear and everybody’s on nil again, so whatever happened last year is last year’s team’s achievement, not this year’s.

“Hopefully we get off to a good start, get some points on the board and push our way to that 50 points as quick as we can and then see where that takes us.”