My Time At Town - Steve Payne: “Hopefully they look back and think that I gave everything for the club”

His first was at a club starting from scratch in the summer of 2008, picking itself up and dusting itself down from the trauma of its previous incarnation going bust.

His second was at a club transformed, moving up the gears and starting the journey that would see them catapulted back up to the top tier of non-league football.

“I was at Stalybridge, we’d just lost in the play-off final in the Conference North the season before,” Payne says of his move to Northern Premier League Division One North side Halifax, the last club of his career.

“We’d just done our first pre-season training day and I got a call from Neil Ross saying ‘Payney, I want you to come to Halifax’. I played with Rossy at Macclesfield years before.

“He said Jim Vince was looking for centre-halves, well a team basically, and said ‘do you fancy it?’

“I looked into Halifax and saw what had happened, but that didn’t deter me at all. It was a huge club, I knew the fanbase it had and it was local, 20 minutes from my house.

“It was quite an opportunity to try and rebuild a big club.”

That process would prove to be frustratingly slow for Payne, who was initially vice-captain to Tony Barrass, but took over as skipper when Barrass left during the season.

“I was one of the first to join,” Payne recalls. “My first pre-season training session, there was probably about 12 lads there. Some on trial, some that had signed.

“Everything was up the air. As a player you do everything you can to get yourself fit, and you just get on with things.

“It was different though, it was a challenge.

“Things were definitely unsettled. We didn’t have a kit for a long time.

“It was starting from scratch.

“In the squad, it was ‘we are Halifax’ and we had a belief that we were going to absolutely romp this league.

“When we started playing some games in pre-season, we got found out.

“We got beat by a few teams and then it suddenly dawns on you, there’s a lot more work to do here than we first thought.

“I thought we’d be up against it early days until we gelled.

“It was a 3-0 home defeat first game of the season and we were awful. It was a real wake-up call for us all.

“There were new players coming in or training with us quite a lot, every training session there used to be new players.

“We had some great banter in the changing room, some great characters like Phil Senior, absolutely nuts, and Nigel Jemson, he was great.

“But it was tough. We were confident as players but some games it just didn’t happen, and that seemed to be the case more often than not.

“Whether it was tactics, or maybe not the right players in certain areas, we weren’t consistent and we got found out quite a few times.
“Maybe the attitudes of a lot of the players were wrong because we thought ‘it’s Halifax, we’re just going to turn up and steamroll these teams’ and it didn’t happen.

“We lost a few players with injuries as well, Rossy went down with knee problems, I went down with my ankle which ruled me out for the last six weeks or so.

“It was difficult to watch because you wanted to be out there giving what you could for the team.

“But it gave me another perspective that I was able to go in the stand and listen to what was being said.

“They’re not daft, they know their football and they can soon work out if somebody’s not giving 100 per cent, which a lot of the time, I’m sad to say, it didn’t seem that way from my point of view.”

Payne, who scored the new club’s first league goal in a 2-1 win at Trafford, says the opposition would also raise their game against The Shaymen, the big boys of the division.

“They were coming to a fantastic stadium with 1,500 people there - it was a case of ‘let’s stick it up them’, ‘let’s show them what we can do’ and we didn’t rise to the occasion,” he says.

“It was a sad season, I didn’t enjoy that season at all. I was pleased to be at the club but I didn’t enjoy, personally because I got injured, but just the way it panned out.

“Towards the back end of the season, the chairman decided to get rid of Jim Vince and for the last three or four games, myself and Nigel Jemson took over, which I loved.

“I was on the phone to Jemmo every day talking about things, it was different for me.

“You suddenly realise the pressure that’s involved in management.”

Payne says he wasn’t surprised when Vince was sacked.

“I didn’t agree 100 per cent with his tactics and the way he did things, but that doesn’t mean to say I didn’t play for him because you play for your team regardless of your thoughts on the manager.

“We’d had a run of bad results and I think there were a few calls from the stands to make some changes.”

But Payne says he never expected Jemson to get the job full-time.

“As far as I was aware it was a stop-gap until the end of the season,” he says.

“Nobody knew what was going to happen, but we knew we’d not performed as a team or a club in that league.

“But when Neil Aspin came in he was a breath of fresh air. It suddenly turned into a professional club.

“A club that seemed to be going somewhere, we had more of an identity, we had a much improved squad.

“He came in and told you as it was. He didn’t suffer fools.

“The first day of pre-season he got us all in the changing room and told us basically ‘don’t mess about, if you mess about, you’re out, don’t mess with me’.

“He instilled a real discipline in us all from the get-go and you had immediate respect for him.

“You had respect for his career anyway, but he was one of the best managers I’ve been under.

“He knew how to get the best out of a player, he was disciplined. He gave you the respect you earned.

“If you weren’t performing well, he’d let you know, and you need that firmness.

“On the flip side of that, he gave you so much praise when you did play well.

“There was a much better feel about the place, it was refreshing, and it felt like a proper football club again.”

Aspin was assisted by the experienced Trevor Storton, and the duo made a formidable partnership, says Payne.

“They were great together. They were your classic double act.

“Trevor was more softly spoken, whereas the gaffer would come in all guns blazing, the hairdryer treatment would come out.

“They’d say exactly the same things to you but in different ways.

“After a rollocking you need a bit of a gee up and Trevor was your man for that.

“What a fabulous fella he was Trevor, I loved him to bits. And the whole squad did.”

But Payne’s second season at the club nearly didn’t happen at all.

“I’d had ankle problems throughout close season,” he recalls. “My ankle had given me nothing but trouble when I went on holiday, just walking round.

“I thought ‘this is it, this is me finished, I can’t play again’.

“I spoke with the physio and he said ‘come in pre-season and we’ll have a chat’. We did a few exercises and it started to feel better.

“So I got myself fit, we had a fitness coach, Kev Gillespie, who knew how to get us fit, and I felt fab.

“You could tell the team was different, it had a character, a purpose, and it was driven.

“You could feel that these players wanted to go somewhere and wanted to do something.

“And we had a hell of a lot of talent in the squad. It immediately felt different, the whole vibe of the club changed that pre-season.

“It’s the best season I’ve had in terms of a squad of players getting on. They were all absolutely brilliant, to a man.

“You had Ryan Crossley, we brought Deano (James Dean) in, and Scooby (Richard Marshall). It was a great squad.
“The club just seemed to take off.”

The difference from the season before was obvious, says Payne.

“We didn’t just win games, we dominated teams. We didn’t hang on, teams would come to us and we knew they were frightened by us.

“Within the first five or 10 minutes of a game, you could tell they were there for the taking.

“We’d turned into one of the big boys in the league again rather than being a big club but not doing it on the pitch.

“It felt great, it really was a great season.”

The Shaymen pipped nearest challengers Lancaster to the title, ammassing 100 points and scoring 108 goals.

Payne and fellow defender Ryan Crossley lifted the league trophy after their final game of the season against Skelmersdale.

“I’d been speaking to the manager a couple of days before, he’d asked what I was doing next year because he wanted me to stay, which was great to hear,” says Payne.

“But by that point I was living off painkillers to get me through the season, I was in a lot of pain, and I thought ‘I can’t do anymore’.

“So I said I was going to call it a day and he said he didn’t want me to go but that he fully understood.

“So he pulled me before that game and said ‘look, I’m going to bring you off with five or 10 minutes to go’ which was a lovely thing for him to do, he didn’t have to do that.

“The game itself flew by for me. Physically I was absolutely knackered, we played a lot of games towards the back end of the season because we’d had a lot of cancellations.

“My body was saying ‘enough’. I was on the pitch but I don’t think it was my best performance.

“When he pulled me off I was thinking ‘thank god for that!’ but I was privileged, there were maybe 3,500-4,000 people there, last home game of the season, and I got a standing ovation, which was humbling.

“I was stood on the halfway line when my number came up and I remember Hedgy (Jonathan Hedge) came running up to me, all the team came in to shake my hand and they were saying their farewell to me.

“That just showed the spirit of the team, that moment epitomised the whole season and how we all felt about each other, because everybody, to a man, was in it together.

“And the fans were nothing but wonderful to me, a wonderful set of people.

“I remember sitting in the dugout, having shaken everyone’s hands, and Ryan Crossley said ‘Payney, stand up, they’re signing your name’.

“I couldn’t hear it, but I put my head out of the dugout and I could hear them all shouting my name. It’s tearful when I think about it, wonderful.

“Hopefully they look back and think that I gave everything for the club.”

Payne says that second season at The Shay was the perfect way to bring the curtain down on his career.

“I went out on a high,” he says. “For me it was the best season in my career.

“I won the Conference twice and the FA Trophy with Macclesfield, that was fab.

“I had five wonderful years at Chesterfield, but that last season at Halifax beats the lot because of the club itself, the squad, the belief, the camaraderie we had.
“It was the most I’ve felt part of a squad ever. Brilliant guys.”

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