Richard Tracey says Emley AFC are gutted to have had the chance of finally ending the hunt for the holy grail of promotion taken away from them.
Emley have come so close time after time over the last decade to winning the elusive promotion to Step 5, and they appeared to be on the brink of doing so under Tracey.
Emley were sitting ten points clear in the fourth and final promotion in the North West Counties Division One North table when the season was brought to an abrupt finish.
All their hard work is now gone as results have been expunged. There is no indications as to when Non League football or normal life will resume and Tracey believes the FA could have waited before pressing the nuclear button on the campaign.
“I think the decision was rushed because no-one knows when we will be allowed back,” Tracey told Non League Yorkshire.
“The lockdown could end, but social-distancing could still be in place for a long time which would mean we would not be able to start playing again. Who’s to say that we end up losing two seasons if we come back at Christmas?
“I don’t care what anyone says, but clubs that go up are the ones with support and investment. We didn’t have a big budget at Emley, but we had support and investment. Speaking to other name-less clubs who would have gone down, it would have benefited them because going down would have made them a more sustainable and more competitive club. Those clubs are going to have to stay and fight it out again. The decision doesn’t balance out the clubs. Some clubs are going to have a battle again with limited resources.
“I can get the decision if next season is going to start as normal, but we don’t know if it will and I’m an advocate of ‘what’s more important about next season’ than this season’?
“Our chairman Andrew Painten put forward an idea suggesting that when we can finish the season that the void between the seasons be filled with a mini regional league. That would help clubs financially as they would be playing local clubs.
“We got so close to winning promotion and it is a kick in the teeth, but what can you do? We were part of the group led by South Shields who asked questions of the FA, but now it has been ratified, we’ve left it to anyone else who wants to pursue it. We have to take it on the chin and it is gutting.
“We averaged 2.07 points per game so we would have finished second if they had gone down to the route of points-per-game.”
Tracey was initially with joint manager Mark Wilson when Emley announced the succession plan to Marlon Adams who had served as interim manager for several months.
Wilson left early on in the campaign to leave Tracey in sole charge with club legend Steve Nicholson continuing to serve as the assistant manager.
When the Government introduced restrictions, Tracey claims his side were ahead of schedule.
“The club have always said there was a five-year plan and promotion this year would have put us ahead of the plan,” he said.
“The club knew you can’t expect a group of staff to come in and get the club promoted straightaway. They wanted to give us time to build something, but we put ourselves in a position where we could have done it this season.
“Promotion has been the holy grail for the club over the last ten years. Darren Hepworth was so close on so many occasions, missing out on goal difference one year. You look and scratch your head, especially when Ash Flynn was scoring 70 goals and Kieran Ryan scoring 25. How has it not materialised? It is unfortunate, but it is a club that needs to be higher.
“The club’s history is wonderful. My full debut as a professional footballer was against Emley for Rotherham in the FA Cup at Barnsley in the 1-1 draw in 1998. The club has history with my career.
“I had only played at Emley once and that was an under 11s for Battyeford boys club, but Emley is a club a lot of my friends I have watched over the years and I heard a lot from them.”
Tracey deserves credit for the way he has steered Emley over the past 12 months. When the club was shifted from its ‘spiritual home’ in the NCEL to the North West Counties, recruitment plans had to be ripped up. With almost every away game a trek, attracting players was difficult. But with talented stars such as Rob Bordman, Jamie Price, Jimmy Eyles and Dom Riordan results were good and Tracey says his team jumped over all the obstacles.
“The away trips were like my old UniBond games with Frickley and Bradford (Park Avenue) because there were some long ones,” he said.
“Because I had managed and played in the NPL I was used to the travelling, but for some of the players it was a nightmare. The M62 is poor, but the stand-out journey was Cleator Moor where I left the house at 7.50am and got home at 11 at night. Fortunately we won 3-2 thanks to a last minute Bordy goal which only he would have scored. It was on a Saturday and it is up through the Lake District and beyond Workington.
“The worst we had to do in midweek was AFC Liverpool at Marine and Bacup Borough – not because of the distance, but because it is all country roads in pitch black.
“It was hard persuading players to come. It was our biggest problem. When you are recruiting, you basically took Barnsley and Sheffield out of the equation because we were playing in the North West. Lads were saying ‘when we get back to Emley, I’ve got another 30 minutes to get home’. It has been a tough ask has the recruitment and one of the challenges.
“But we have found a group who to be fair if we have when football returns we’re happy with it.
“A lot of the lads had played for us (Tracey and assistant Steve Nicholson before) so we knew they knew each other, but we didn’t know how well we would do because the league was an unknown. It took us two months to acclimatise.
“We didn’t know what we would come up against and the North West Counties is very different to the NCEL. It is very academy football based which is not surprising as there are a number of big clubs around like Manchester United and City, Liverpool, Burnley, Bolton. There are a lot of lads who have come out of academies and they play football. It is definitely more of a football league than the NCEL.
“At times it hurts you because they are good at it, but at times it hurts them because they are quite naive. It doesn’t surprise me that Lower Breck and ourselves and Shelley were near the top because we and them had more experience.
“We have had to rebuild the side completely. We met a number of the Emley players when we took over last year, but only a handful ended up staying as a few went to Golcar.
“We only had George (Clarke) in goal, Wayne Hughes, James Stafford and Josh Ingham from last season. In rebuilding the side, we also had a few players who hadn’t played the year before and it took them a while to get going. That’s the likes of Rob Bordman, Dom Riordan, Alex Metcalfe. We sort of dragged them out of retirement.
“It was difficult, but the team we had by the end we believed was good enough to finish the job.”