AS Mark Beesley prepares to take charge of Warrington Town for the 100th time on Saturday, the scale of their progress under his leadership can be measured by who their opponents are.
The Town boss reaches a century with arguably their most anticipated fixture of the National League North campaign – a trip to Glanford Park to take on Scunthorpe United.
When Beesley first joined Yellows as assistant to Paul Carden in October 2016, The Iron were battling for promotion to English football’s second tier, eventually losing out in the play-offs having finished third in League One.
Since then, they have fallen on hard times and as a result of their slide through the leagues and Town’s rise under Beesley, they now meet as equals.
And regardless of result, the manager has called upon everyone associated with the club to enjoy what is a marquee fixture.
Next up on the agenda...
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📅 Saturday 25 November
🏟️ Glanford Park
⏰ 3:00pm kick-off
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“I took my first game against Morpeth and if you’d told me then that my 100th would be a league game against Scunthorpe, I’d have thought you were mad,” he said.
“It’s the scope and identity of where the club is now – we’re going to play a league game against a club that was in the Championship a decade ago in front of 4-5,000 people.
“It’s a reward for everybody at the club – for the chairman and his family, for everyone behind the scenes who put a lot of unseen work in, for the players and for the supporters.
“Win, lose or draw, it’s a game we should embrace and be proud of. It’s probably the one we looked for the most when the fixtures came out.
“We have to go and compete on the pitch, but hopefully we’ll have a big following go up there to enjoy it as well.”
Beesley’s ascension to the Cantilever Park hotseat came precisely two years ago after Carden, under whom he served as number two for five years, left to join AFC Telford United.
Indeed, Carden was believed to be keen on the idea of taking Beesley with him to the New Buck’s Head, but he remained to build on the foundations he left.
Town finished that season agonisingly short of promotion having lost the Northern Premier League Premier Division play-off final to Scarborough Athletic, but they finished Beesley’s first full campaign in charge by finishing on the right side of the same fixture against Bamber Bridge to spark wild scenes of celebration at Cantilever Park.
“If I remember rightly, I don’t think I could have gone,” he said, referencing the chance to join Carden at Telford.
“There were work and family commitments, and Toby (Macormac, Town chairman) had put his trust in me to take it on.
“I wanted to do it my way and change one or two things – not straight away but as we progressed, we started to do things differently.
“If I look back on it, we had a good squad but there were subtle changes we made.
“I still think we should have got promoted that year – we did brilliantly and then the play-off final is majorly affected by a refereeing decision – but we went away and learned from it.
“Luckily for us, we had the opposite feeling the year afterwards.”
The core group of players assembled by Carden and taken forward by Beesley remain in place – of the 17 players named in the squad for his first game in charge against Morpeth Town in the FA Trophy in November 2021, eight are still with the club as are Josh Amis and Evan Gumbs, who were injured that day.
Flourishes have been added – he added the likes of Tom Hannigan, Andy White and Isaac Buckley-Ricketts while forward Connor Woods also joined on a club record deal.
However, the person he credits as being the most important addition is assistant manager David Raven, the former Town centre-back who has proved a successful right-hand man.
“He has definitely been my best signing. Without him, I couldn’t do what I want to do,” Beesley said.
“We work together, we deeply analyse things and we both believe the same things about how we want to play.
“At the same time, we challenge each other and we’re always looking to improve.
“We work really well together and while the club has made some great signings over the past few years in terms of players, Dave is my most important signing and I don’t think that will ever change.”
While the on-field successes are clear, Beesley says the growth of the club as a whole over the past two years gives him just as much pride.
An encapsulation of that can be found in the number of people making their way through the Cantilever Park turnstiles.
In the 2016-17 season – his first as assistant to Carden – the club’s average home gate was 282. By the end of his first half-season as manager, that had grown to 563.
Now, four-figure crowds are the norm – their average over the 11 home games they have played in all competitions this season is 1,002.
They now face a race against time in order to make the required improvements to their home ground to accommodate their new level and the increased crowds.
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE CLUB'S 'GROUNDFUNDER' CAMPAIGN CAN BE FOUND HERE
“I’ve said many times that our home games now feel like big events. The club’s grown massively on and off the pitch,” Beesley said.
“At the moment, we’re getting more than 1,000 people at most home games – the younger fans are coming and the older ones are staying, the atmosphere’s always good and we’ve had some great times.
“I think everyone who has come on board and comes to games seems to really enjoy it whether we win or not, because we obviously can’t win all of the time.
“Everyone knows what is going on off it and we’ve got a deadline we need to meet, but the club has transitioned and everyone should be proud of where we are at the minute.”
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