Christian Fox hopes it will be third time lucky as Selby Town prepare to launch another assault on winning promotion.
Fox, Selby’s longest-serving manager since Bob Lyon, has transformed the club’s fortunes over the last two years, but has been unable to return them to the NCEL’s top flight.
Although crowds have gone up more than 100% because of his side’s swashbuckling style of football, promotion has eluded them and Fox is aiming to put that right in 2020.
“I’m excited about the new season,” former York City star Fox told Non League Yorkshire.
“Last season was a bit of a write-off, especially the second half of it. But now we have a fresh stab at it and I’m excited about the players we’ve brought in.
“You’ve seen tonight (the 1-0 friendly defeat to Tadcaster Albion) that going forward we will excite our fans and we’ll score more goals.
“We’ve been in charge in two years and we know we need to deliver. Apart from getting to the West Riding County Cup final (in 2018), we haven’t really done anything on the pitch.
“If you look at it as a whole, when we came in we wanted to increase the attendances, we wanted to play decent football. Taking the results side out, which I do accept is the most important thing, we have achieved what we wanted and it shows things are going in the right direction.
“We’re hoping for 200+ plus as an average this season and if we do deliver on the pitch then I don’t see that being a problem.
“We’ve done everything, but won promotion. Four go up this season and we’re going to try and build a squad that is capable of pushing towards the top end.
“There’s more of a chance this year of going up. Everyone from first to 12th are going to have a decent shout right throughout the season. It is better for us and better for the teams around us.
“We will have a push and see where it takes us.”
By his own admission, injuries and suspensions finished off Selby’s promotion bid last season.
The Robins were in the top two at the beginning of December, but they then lost key players such as captain Ryan Gothard, Carl Stewart and Alex Robinson to injury, plus Chris Bilton and Will Ramsay to suspensions.
Three defeats followed and because of the one promotion spot, the battle was lost by early January.
“We came close-ish to the play-offs in the first season, but just missed out” he said.
“Last season we needed more strength-in-depth. We were running on bare bones by the end of the season.
“We needed bodies in and we’re really happy with the business we have done so far this summer, but we still need a few more. We’ve identified a few and we’re working on bringing them in.
“We’ve not quite satisfied (with the squad), but there’s a lot of positives to take from tonight because we finished the game strongly. We were creating a lot of chances.”
Selby’s first signing was announced at lunchtime on Tuesday as the return of local lad Chris Jackson was confirmed.
Fox has also recruited the Walker brothers Danny and Josh from East Hull. Combined with the returns of Liam Flanagan and magic man Joe Dale, Selby have a strike-force that has over 200 goals between them in the last few years.
Fox accepts that he could have to alter his favoured formation to fit in all four forwards.
“It might mean a change of our style of play.” he said.
“We had a look at a couple of things tonight, but I don’t want to give too much away.
“There is a starting formation that we will go with, but then there’s adaptions that we can make. It gives a bit of flexibility with the players we have got.
“I will say there is going to be competition for places for the forward places. Competition for places across the pitch is something we didn’t have last season.
“There’s got to be competition so that players perform to keep their shirts.
“People will say to me ‘how are you going to keep them happy’? For me it is up to them to keep me happy to stay in the starting eleven.
“To do that they have to perform and since they’re strikers, they are paid to score goals.”