Chesterfield manager Paul Cook reflects on one-year anniversary at Spireites

The 55-year-old was reappointed Spireites manager exactly a year ago today.

He led them to the play-off semi-finals last season and they are currently fifth in the table this term.

Town have lost their last three and Cook says it his job to ‘galvanise’ the players now.

He told the DT: “We had a lot of change in the summer, a lot of lads leaving, a lot of new lads coming in.

“We have had two good runs this season, and we have had two bad weeks.

“We got to 52 points three games ago now and I thought that was a really healthy halfway mark.

“We have had a bad 10 days, it has been really disappointing, within that everyone starts having different opinions and it is football. My job now is to galvanise these players, to make them believe in themselves, to make our supporters support them like I know our supporters can, and to do that we have got to give our supporters to feed off. On Tuesday night we gave our supporters nothing to feed off for 45 minutes.”

Cook also explained that the Blues are probably not as far ahead as Wrexham and Notts County are in their respective projects and that his aim is to get more ‘value for money’ on the pitch.

“We are still dealing with contracts and we are certainly not as strong as we can be on the pitch financially with the money we have spent,” Cook said.

“Unfortunately, for us, a lot of problems we have, we have to keep from supporters, you can’t just come out everyday and tell supporters exactly what is going on, as much I would like to sometimes, by the way.

“The trust has been brilliant, the chairman, John (Croot), Andy Fantom, they have been great. We are still working through bits of stuff where we want all our value for money on the pitch, that is what we need and that is what we want.

“Wrexham and the big clubs at the top have had a little bit of a start on us this year in terms of being together longer. We are still trying to sign players, bring players in, and make the squad better. There is so much good at Chesterfield and we have got to concentrate now on just ourselves and back on the horse and riding again.”