Athersley Rec manager Shane Kelsey has suggested a June finish to the new season to take away the huge demands currently facing clubs and players.
If the Toolstation Northern Counties East League campaign begins on the 5th September, clubs face a mammoth schedule to fit in all their games by the end of April – with the large possibility of disruption caused by local lockdowns and bad weather.
Kelsey hopes the season does start when planned, but admits he would not be surprised if the NCEL follow the North West Counties in moving the provisional start date to October and believes a June ending would be a fair solution.
“I would be a big advocate for starting in October and finishing in June,” Kelsey told Non League Yorkshire.
“A 38-league game season is not feasible (from September to April) if there’s going to be local lockdowns plus, FA competitions and bad weather.
“It is a sensible decision to cancel the County Cups and League Cups, but in terms of completing a season, history and experience tells you that it is going to be a hard task.
“You don’t have many call offs between the start of the season and December. It is February and early March that over the last few years we haven’t seen many games.
“I don’t understand why we get to the end of the season and they say you have to play eight games in ten days. There’s no reason why we can’t finish in June this year because of everything that has happened.
“If it is then a case of a short pre-season next year, I think people will be happy to do it.
“Some clubs ground-share with Cricket, but I see a simple explanation to that, football comes together and people say ‘can we use your ground, can we play here’?
“It should not be an issue. I know my club would accommodate someone else and I’d like to think everyone would look after each other.
“I’d like to think we’ll start with the FA Cup on the 1st September and then the first league game on the 5th, but in reality it would not surprise if we end up starting at the backend of September or early October.
“The demands on players are very high (if we start in September and finish in April) and I gave an example to my mate the other day, you look at the league below:
“I know we have all said we are going to have to play Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday-Tuesday, but you take your Harrogate Railway versus Skegness – a three hour journey is nuts.
“You take Skegness. every away game to them is nuts. When they’re coming to Worsbrough it is nearly a two hour journey and you can’t hire a coach at the minute.
“Especially in the league below, this means there’s going to be a lot of young lads who are going to be reliant on their parents driving them.”
Kelsey also agrees it would be crazy from a financial point of view to start without spectators.
“I’d like the season to start in September, but I’ve given up guessing because it is nuts,” he said.
“There’s different areas of the country having restrictions put back into place, i.e. Kirklees, Bradford and parts of Manchester.
“You’ve see some disgruntled managers on social media this weekend because people can’t go in a football ground, but you see pictures of town centres or cricket matches and the places are chockablock.
“We need fans in the ground, they are the lifeblood of the game. You see what happened at Droylsden and it is heart-breaking and there’ll be more clubs going to the wall if we don’t get fans in the ground.”
Kelsey’s pre-season training schedule has been underway for some time, with the Rec playing their first game at Belper Town on Saturday.
Fitness has been a core element of his plans, with Kelsey focusing on drills he learnt from his former Garforth Town manager Simon Clifford.
“His (Simon Clifford’s) training was unbelievable fitness-wise, I’ve never been as fit in my life,” he said.
“There was nobody fitter than us in that league. Everyone bought into it.
“We’ve done some of his drills, to a certain extent. We have been away from the ground doing stat runs, hill runs, stuff like that. We’ve done a lot of short sharp burst stuff like sprints.
“Simon was big on endurance and we have focussed a lot of our drills on endurance.
“It is not until the end of your career and you have a wise head on you and realise that it was actually good for you and he was pushing you to be better.
“We did endurance work at Ossett Albion, but not to the extent that Simon did it.
“We used to go down to Roundhay Park which is like 2.6 mile long and we’d run round the lake three times and you’d think that was the end of training. It wasn’t because you’d go down to the bottom end and you’d do the banking run ten times. You’d be knackered.
“I’m not taking our lads to Roundhay Park! Where we are there are some good runs on a similar par to Roundhay Park.
“I’ve said this to the lads; as a footballer, technically, you can’t always be as good as other players and teams, but what doesn’t cost anything is either being better off or at least matching them in fitness if you’re putting the work in.
“That’s the big reason why we have pushed ourselves on that. Yesterday away at Belper, in 400 degrees, the lads were brilliant.
“They ran from the first minute to the last minute and didn’t get overawed by a team which was near the top of the league when the shutdown came and also got to the FA Cup fourth qualifying round.”
If you have enjoyed this interview, please consider making a donation to the not-for-profit organisation NLY Community Sport which provides sport for children and adults with disabilities and learning difficulties. CLICK HERE to visit the JustGiving page.
There is a video at the bottom of the page showing our work.
NLY Community Sport, run by James Grayson and Connor Rollinson, has always had combatting social isolation at the top of our objectives when running our Disability Football teams so when the green light to return is given, our work will play an important role in reintroducing our players, who have disabilities and learning difficulties, back into society.
We have six teams, a mixture of Junior and Adult teams – Nostell MW DFC, Pontefract Pirates, Selby Disability Football Club and the South Yorkshire Superheroes (Barnsley) – across Yorkshire.
We have enjoyed great success over the past three years. Several of our players have represented Mencap GB in Geneva, including Billy Hobson from Selby and Greg Smith, whose story is quite inspiring.
Like most organisations, we have been affected financially by the Coronavirus and we have incurred losses which we cannot recover. We have not been hit as badly as other organisations, but we do need raise £2000 to put us back at the level we were at in mid-March and enable us to make a difference once again to our players’ lives in the future, without having financial worries. As each day goes by, a substantial number of our players become further isolated so we need to be ‘ready for action’ when restrictions are lifted.
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