Is Adam Hinshelwood the right man to rescue York City's season?

The Worthing manager has been successful in Sussex, but North Yorkshire is a very long way from there.

It’s not that difficult to see the appeal of York City to their new manager Adam Hinshelwood. This is a club that is still awaiting a team to match their smart new stadium. They may currently only be above the National League relegation places by two goals on goal difference, but this is a club which sees their ‘true’ place as being in the EFL.

The last couple of decades might not have shown too much evidence of this—York fell out of the Football League for the first time in 2004, and have only spent four years back there since—but expectations don’t match with current realities at a lot of clubs. They didn’t move to from a characterful and charming city centre ground to an all-seater on the outskirts of town for this.

The team that he’s leaving, Worthing, are from the town in which I currently reside. But I’m not a Worthing fan. I go and see them a few times a season, and I wish them well. They have an excellent club there, which has really grown into its local community in recent years. The ground is cramped but being improved, crowds are high, and the team is in more or less their highest ever league position.

But it’s not my club. I’ve lived ‘down here’ in Sussex for almost 18 years, and in Worthing for half of that time. If I’m not really feeling it now I probably never will, though my kids might. It feels as though Worthing belong to somebody else. But the heart wants what the heart wants, I guess.

There aren’t many points at which being able to offer a genuinely unemotional assessment of Adam Hinshelwood’s strengths and weaknesses as a manager will have much use, so I may as well use it now. My honest first reaction to the announcement was that I wasn’t certain that he was the right decision. It feels like more of a gamble than it should be, considering that there are only a handful of league places between the two clubs. But the picture is more mixed than that, because there are ways in which this should be considered a very progressive move from York.

For Worthing, Hinshelwood’s departure is obviously bad news. He’d been their manager for the last seven years, and nine of the last eleven. He couldn’t have been any more popular with supporters. He took the club into the National League South and it required some persistence to do so. Both the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons were abandoned with Hinshelwood’s teams hot favourites for promotion from the Isthmian League Premier Division.

It would have been easy for that upward momentum to have faltered, but instead they scored 100 goals in 42 matches during the 2021/22 season, running up 97 points and winnng the title by ten points. Last season they finished fourth in the National League South, their highest ever league finish (second place in the Isthmian League Premier Division in 1984 was arguably technically higher, but it’s not really comparing like with like - there was no National League South in 1984). As Hinshelwood leaves, they’re third.

It’s certainly not inconceivable that they could be playing a division higher than York next season, although it should also be added that were this to happen, it would almost involve the play-offs since it already seems vanishingly unlikely that Yeovil Town, who are already eleven points clear with a game in hand on second-placed Chelmsford City, will be caught at the top of the table.

Worthing are third and the National League South’s weird-ass play-offs go down to 7th, but even now they’re only six points above 8th-placed Aveley, with eleven games to play. How the players react to his departure is surely what will define the rest of their season. If these departures instil a little of fire in their bellies, National League football next season certainly isn’t out of the question. But it also has to be considered a possibility that this could be the precursor to a stumble or fall, too. We shall see.

What are York getting for their money? The most succinct way in which I can describe Worthing teams of recent years would be ‘attacking but brittle’. They score a lot of goals. They’ve only scored fewer than 70 league goals in a season once since 2007, and on that occasion they scored 69. Nice.

(Actually, they only scored 22 goals during the 2020/21 season, but that was only from 8 games, an average of over three goals per game.)

But that defence sure can fold. Despite finishing fourth last season, they conceded five, six and seven goals in separate league matches. This season they’re third, but they’ve still somehow conceded four goals in the league on eight separate occasions. They’re the division’s top scorers—they’ve scored 13 more than runaway leaders Yeovil—but no-one else in the top nine has conceded more, either.

They play attractive football, usually keeping the ball on the ground; the club were also fairly early adopters of an artificial playing surface, and it certainly seems to have influenced the way in which Hinshelwood’s Worthing team has played football. But what feels particularly significant is him getting them past that two year run when they were favourites to go up but didn’t to win the league when things finally did get back into order.

In the first of those two years, they were seven points clear with eight games left to play when the first pandemic lockdowns kicked in. The following season, 2020/21, ended early when they were a point clear at the top of the table, but having only played eight games, giving them three in hand on second-placed Cheshunt and two in hand on third-placed Enfield Town, who were three points behind them.

It does take strength of character to then walk the division at the third attempt. It is, so far as I can see, the biggest justification for him stepping up. Having the ability to foster that sort of resilience over a period of three years which were bad enough in many other ways would be quite a skillset to have, if it can be replicated. That he played attacking, attractive football—as the statistics show—made it all the better.

It would be remiss not to mention Ollie Pearce, who’s currently the National League’s top goalscorer this season with 33 goals in 33 games including four hat-tricks, including a 4 and 3 in successive games. He scored 29 league goals last season, and 37 the season before that. But the likelihood of Worthing letting him go before the end of this season is not high. Assistant manager Gary Elphick and coach Cameron Morrison have already gone too. They won't be wanting to lose anyone else this vital before the end of this season.

It remains a fair question, though: could Pearce be almost as much responsible for their incredible last three seasons as Hinshelwood? My honest answer is, I don’t think there’s any way of knowing until we they’ve been apart a while. Over those three seasons Pearce has scored 99 league goals for Worthing, and he’s still got 11 league games—plus possible play-offs—to play this time around. He is a phenomenal striker, but he’s not particularly young (he’s 29 in August) and he won’t be going anywhere before the end of this season that isn’t on Worthing’s terms.

He’s out of contract in the summer and unlikely to be short of suitors. If he was to try his luck at a higher level, would he uproot everything to move hundreds of miles north right now, or would it be more suitable to wait until the summer, and make a decision that doesn’t throw him into the middle of a relegation dogfight with an instruction to start scoring goals immediately at a level at which he’s never played before in front of a large crowd with high expectations and a hint of desperation in the air?

Hinshelwood is well-known locally, of course. He’s also been the manager at Selsey and Hastings United and assistant manager at Burgess Hill Town. He spent the majority of his playing career with Brighton & Hove Albion. His son Jack has recently broken into the Albion first team himself. Worthing have done well out of offering another chance to local players who didn’t quite make it elsewhere—Pearce arrived from local rivals Bognor Regis Town—so how will things change, a long way from the world with which he’s been so familiar for so long?

It should also be added that York City are in a pretty desperate situation at the moment. They've not scored more than a single goal in a league game once since New Year’s Day. If there’s any type of manager they could do with at the moment, it’s one who can get a team scoring again, and Worthing have definitely been doing that under their new man.

But this is a higher level than Hinshelwood has been manager at before, while he as yet has no emotional connection to York’s large support-base, and getting a team scoring goals takes more than a click of the fingers. It not difficult to see how things could turn sour.

That makes him a bit of a gamble for York, too. He’s untested at this level. He plays attacking football but his teams are capable of folding. So York’s choice is in some respects a progressive one. Hinshelwood may well have no experience managing at this level, but how important is that nowadays? York are going for an attacking manager, a manager whose teams have consistently scored goals for years.

“Experience” is what used keep the Proper Football Men on the merry-go-round. They do still exist, but they are no longer the dominant species. The required skillset has transformed beyond what they can offer. Clubs have become more adventurous in their decision-making over new managers.

And while Hinshelwood might have 13 years coaching and managerial experience, he’s still only 40. He started at the very bottom of the senior game, in the Southern Combination Football League at Selsey, and built his reputation up from there. There is a lot to recommend him.

Adam Hinshelwood leaves Woodside Road with the best wishes of the supporters. There hasn’t been much but sadness at a lengthy era coming to an end and maybe a touch of concern over what this could mean for the rest of Worthing’s season, but there seems to be a general acceptance that this sort offer was always likely to come at some point or other.

And there’s no doubt that Worthing have been entertaining to watch for a very long time. In many respects, they’re perfect for the neutral watcher. The games are usually pretty entertaining, crowds are high but I’ve never seen any trouble from the home supporters, there’s a good chance of a lot of goals, and they usually win, though there’s enough jeopardy about them to make every game feel as though it could have a bit of spice to it. Of course, there should always be the caveat that he might do things quite differently elsewhere.

Whether he’s what York City need to survive relegation from the National League is a question we’ll find out the answer to over the next three months.