King's Lynn boss Lakeland on summer recruitment job

Lakeland and Co head to Spennymoor Town, with talk of National League North relegation off the agenda after a season which promised so much after the close shave with promotion a year ago, but in the end delivered just a nerve-shredding ride to safety.

Lakeland inherited a patchwork quilt of a squad when he took over from Mark Hughes last October – the deadwood was flushed out and new faces brought in. A season that started with the wayward happy wanderer traveller Quaine Bartley up front ended with the more refined and properly travelled Jonny Margetts.

Josh Barret – and Lynn – succumbed to Tommy Widdrington’s charms and headed to Aldershot, Adam Crowther, perhaps more nobly, was sold to Southend. Billy Jones was just hitting his straps when injury took hold and he returned to Fleetwood. Manny Oke was loaned out, Jordan Ponticelli largely sidelined by injury, Jack Smith and Sion Spence were found wanting, while loan players like Kai Yearn, Ethan Sutcliffe and Aaron Powell will simply be names on an appearances list.

But Lakeland will rightly point to the successes – Fleetwood allowed another youngster, George Morrison, to stay and he repaid Lynn in spades. Margetts has scored nine goals in 13 starts. Cameron Hargreaves, who was in and out of the side at the beginning of the season, has not stopped running since the turn of the year. The backline – five in front of the brilliant keeper Paul Jones, has been pretty much constant, and when Kian Ronan went off on international duty with Gibraltar, Lakeland managed to get Ross Barrows back on loan. Smart move.

What also changed was the bit between the ears – no longer do you fear for a cricket score when Lynn concede. Dylan Crowe and Greg Taylor had a lot to do with that alongside old hands Josh Coulson and Kyle Callan-McFadden.

And if you want a diamond unearthed, then Lakeland had that as well, in the shape of his 37-year-old assistant Sam Walker, who has been brilliant.

Bar the 3-0 up, 4-3 defeat at home to Scarborough, Lakeland has always passed the praise on to his players. Now he has to decide which of them stays, which ones go - and who replaces them.

He’ll have his own list of targets, which is then subject to the vagaries of the usual summer transfer shenanigans over money, contracts, rival bids … but he will also be flooded with names of players who, in truth, are way below the standard required, but whose xE for enthusiasm is off the Richter scale.

“It's the worst time to be a manager at the end of the season, because all the stuff you like doing day-to-day, your training, games, your prepping, you don't have any of that, but your phone's just non-stop,” said Lakeland.

“Your emails are non-stop and you're trying to recruit and you put a lot of time and effort and energy into trying to sign players and then you go a long way down the line and then some of them don't come off and you feel like you've wasted your time and your energy, but you've got to do everything you need to do.

“It's a tough time, the off-season, but it's probably the most important time.”

“Obviously you'll have time to spend with family as well and I'll definitely be going away a few times, but the phone will still be on because there's no rest in this job.”

Lakeland looks back a year and sees the recruitment mistakes – he knows they can’t be repeated.

“And it's the hardest part of the job, recruitment,” he said. “I think naturally any manager at any club, you're going to get the odd one wrong, the trick is to get more right than you get wrong.

“I think probably last summer we got way too many wrong and we were miles off it. I think in the main the lads who we've brought in, if you look at Dylan Crowe, Greg Taylor, George Morrison, Sam, Jonny, Owen (Devonport), just off the top of my head, they've all come in and made us better and if we can just recruit well again in the summer and add to a sound group that we've already put together then I think we'll be alright.”