Simon Grayson: Why I was ready to commit to Fleetwood Town

READ MORE From Mumbai to Fleetwood: Grayson's strange year.

The 51-year-old signed a ‘long-term’ contract last week, with his previous deal set to expire at the end of the season.

Grayson was brought in initially to end the club’s winless run and slide down the table, which he has achieved.

He admits a good relationship with Town owner Andy Pilley may have contributed to his appointment, but adds that Fleetwood met certain requirements which made him happy to commit.

“You look at many things,” Grayson told the EFL Podcast. “You look at the owner: Does he give you time to implement your own ideas? “Has the club got good facilities? Well, both boxes were ticked straight away.

“Andy is a good football person and the training facilities are second to none.

“It’s somewhere you can hopefully establish yourself and build something, and who knows where it can end up?

“His ambition is to get into the Championship, and if I didn’t think I could do that at Fleetwood I wouldn’t have gone there myself.

“Andy and I have a lot of respect for each other.

“I’ve known him since the early 2000s, when I was Blackpool boss and Fleetwood hosted our reserves. I got to know Andy quite well and we remained in touch, hence maybe why I got the job recently.

“You sometimes go to a ground and instantly hit it off.

“You can go 18 months without speaking to somebody, then suddenly you speak to them and you have this relationship you feel comfortable with and that’s where we are.

“Whatever happens in the future won’t damage the relationship I have with Andy Pilley as it hasn’t with (his chairmen elsewhere) Peter Ridsdale, Dean Hoyle and Ken Bates... to a certain degree.”

Town’s head coach is seeking his fifth promotion with a League One club and outlined what he feels has made him successful.

He said: “I think you have to have a good dressing room, a good spirit and camaraderie.

“Hopefully the players are enjoying it and buying into the ideas you are trying to teach them on a daily basis and taking them into a match-day situation.

“My biggest philosophy is to make sure players have no regrets after every game and enjoy themselves. Life is too short to worry about ifs, buts and maybes.

“Go out and express yourselves. Any player who has worked with me will know I’m a hard taskmaster but I’m also a person they can get on well with and enjoy working with, without any extreme pressure other than the pressure to win matches.

“Anybody who has known me as a manager will know I don’t get too high when I’m winning games and don’t get too low when we’ve lost.

“I hurt, of course I do, and I get excited but I don’t show my emotions too much to people because that’s how I am as a person.

“And hopefully when the big games come around the players can sense we are there to do a job, but nobody is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks if we don’t do it.

“Pressure can lead to lots of different things and people can’t handle it.

“It’s also about understanding the players you are working with: who needs a stick round the backside and who needs an arm around the shoulder, and what motivates the players.

“All this comes from experience over the years.”

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