INTERVIEW: One of the best dressing room atmospheres I’ve come across

Colin West on the frustration of just missing out

In the second part of our interview with assistant manager Colin West he spoke about the frustration of just missing out after what had been a challenging campaign in the top half of League Two.

“It’s frustrating at the end of the season when you see that we were only a few points away from it,” he admitted. “Without trying to pinpoint one reason for it you could start to talk about little injuries at key times or the amount of travelling we had to do, and stuff like that, but I honestly think they’re just things you have to get on with.

“In general, when you look back and be honest with yourself, there are situations where we felt we threw points away when we really should have seen games out. They came back to haunt us at the end of it all.”

“We’ve all learned from it and I think it’s one of the best dressing room atmospheres I’ve come across,” he said. “Danny Grainger mentioned exactly that at the awards dinner and I think it’s another sign of real progress.

“It’s an environment players are enjoying and that was something we set out to try and create from the outset. If the lads are easy with each other and they enjoy their work then it means you get more out of them.

“A big part of the season was making sure there was a positive approach to every working day. We get on well as a group of staff, and we make sure we’re the same with the players, even though you know you can’t get too close to them.

“There’ll always be situations where you have to tell them things they don’t want to hear but they accept that and they use everything we say as a learning tool.”

The new season brought with it a change of role for the assistant manager which saw him take more of an analytical brief during all of the first team fixtures.

“It’s a development which has worked really well in my opinion,” he said. “I think the manager likes it that way because it’s something we did at Notts County.

“Down there I was the one in the dugout, like Lee Dykes is at the moment, and we had Colin Lee further up in the stand. It was useful because he could see certain things we couldn’t. I’m doing the same and I constantly feed them information as I see it happen within the game.

“I also have different points of view for the half time and full time talks and it can bring a bit of a better perspective to the things we have to say. It allows Keith to see things through my eyes and I know he really appreciates that.

“It’s added things to us a management group because we’re able to identify where situations go wrong and where there are other things we want to change. I know my opinion isn’t always going to be right, but that’s the same for the manager, Lee and Simon [Tracey], so that’s why we do things the way we do. We have very open dialogue between the four of us and we find that it works really well.”

Click HERE for part one of this interview.

Part three of this interview will appear on the official website on Thursday morning.