On the eve of Wycombe Wanderers’ play-off semi-final against Plymouth, chairman Andrew Howard and manager Gareth Ainsworth sat down at Adams Park for an exclusive interview with the BFP.

The pair gave their perspectives on a successful season for the club on and off the pitch, the challenges presented over the course of the campaign and their vision for the future. 

Read the first of the three part series here...

Andrew, this has been your first season as a football club chairman, how would you describe your first year in the role?

AH: It’s been incredibly challenging. Like any new industry you go in and you think you know what will happen but there’s a uniqueness to football. The most important thing is that it’s been rewarding because a lot of the objectives we’ve set we have delivered. In any project if you go in, set objectives and you deliver them I think that’s a big tick in the box.

Gareth, what has it been like working with Andrew this season?

GA: It’s been totally different to any chairman I’ve known before, which is putting it in a good and refreshing way. I think football in general has these rules and expectancies about how people should be, but they’re not rules. It’s the way people are, it’s like a tradition and a culture that football has fallen into. I think Andrew’s been a breath of fresh air to change things. I’m a young manager just starting out who obviously wants to be different. Every manager has aspirations of doing something different, doing things his own way and I’ve had the chance under Andrew to express myself more than other chairman would let you. We think the same and we talk a lot about what we want to do, but with the football on the pitch and what’s happening off the pitch there’s things at Wycombe Wanderers which are new to football, let alone Wycombe.

When you came together in the summer, where did you want the team to be this season?

AH: Well, the first time we met was in the corridor in the main office and I’d never even met Gareth before then. What came across to me was that with managers, especially young managers, that there’s almost this expectation that you are the finished article, you stop playing on the Saturday, you start managing on the Monday and you are the complete manager. No industry does that. No industry puts somebody into a management role without coaching them, mentoring them and developing them. It wasn’t just Gareth, it was true of everybody. We set out a simple stall of survival. We said 55 points as we thought that was ambitious. We thought 50 was probably a little too close to the mark, as it was 50 would have put us half-way up the table. The main aim then was to build an environment where we could just deliver 55 points. We were really looking to the season afterwards – I’m not saying we’d written the season off but we’d said ‘look, let’s concentrate on getting everything right this season ready for next season’.

GA: You can’t go through a season, like we did last season, thinking that you’re going to achieve promotion at the start of the season. You’ve got ambition and you think the squad that you’ve put a good squad together, but the scars of last year were always fresh. You’re worried that we want to survive in the league, there’s a new chairman coming in and it was the first time with my squad, my team and my philosophy. You do believe in it but after last season you really did get hit quite badly. It was the best thing that happened to me but it was also a hell of a difficult time. This season the 55 point mark took the pressure off a lot of people. We knew where the club was at off the pitch and we knew that survival in the Football League was one little piece of the puzzle that we could put together. Survival was just one little piece and I said to Andrew, when he set the target, that I would deliver that for him and I’m really glad that we did. I didn’t think we’d have done it by January!

Was there a time during the season when it dawned on you that you had a real chance of achieving something great?

AH: No. Last week at Plymouth I think that we played as well as we did in October and November when everything was singing and dancing. It’s awesome that the lads can deliver that when they’re absolutely off their feet at the end of the season, but no. If you have a business plan, don’t get greedy just deliver the business plan and the business plan was 55 points. Because of the French trip we were in France in early February and when we went across we had 56 points. We then decided that we’d go on a new strategy. We’d agreed the strategy, we’d delivered the strategy and that’s when we decided ‘right, let’s take the shackles off’ as a team and as a group of people.

GA: It was a new focus for the boys as well. We’d got the focus of 55 points, we’d reached that, we gave them a couple of games but we felt that we needed to give the boys a new target and a new focus.

AH: But only because they’d achieved the previous one. We didn’t move the goalposts during the middle of it. Because we’d had a few wins we didn’t suddenly say ‘right, we’re Barcelona’, we delivered and we went again. The guys really stepped up to that. The pressure was off them. We’re staying in the Football League, you’ve done what we asked and we honestly said...

GA: ‘Let’s set something high for them, let’s set them promotion’ and that’s how the conversation went believing that a small chance. No way did we believe that we’d be in it right until the bitter end.

AH: They couldn’t fail. The key to our players and the key to the longevity of getting the right squad is not setting them up for failure. As far as we were concerned go and play your football, go and do what you can and to me that stays until the end of the season. To get where they are, to be where they are on Thursday night is immense. Any further, fantastic, but where they are on Thursday night is immense already. Plymouth just summed up everything about this club – the way those lads played, considering the injuries and how small the squad it. They had the women’s FA Cup semi-final here last Monday and both benches were twice the size of our benches. When you looked down you thought ‘my god, what if we had that many people on our bench’.

You can read part two of the interview here.