'I have loved every minute since I came in here' - Lynn assistant Hugo Langton

Langton came into The Walks less than 12 hours after Tommy Widdrington was revealed as the successor to Ian Culverhouse a little over a month ago.

It was a baptism of fire of sorts, as Langton explained.

“I came here and met the players literally one hour before we played Dover,” said Langton.

“Tom introduced me, ‘this is my assistant this is who he is’, I have gone out on to the pitch to do the warm-up and to a man they have all come up and either shook my hand or done that kind of man hug thing that people do. Straight away we entered a dialogue together and they were absolutely brilliant.

“I have loved every minute since I came in here, there are a lot of reasons why I came here - I have a lot of history with the manager, we were together at another club, Eastbourne Borough, we stayed in touch, we worked together little bits in terms of scouting and player recruitment at other clubs where he’s worked when I have not been coaching.

“I have to do say since I came here, from the moment I walked through the door and met the players one hour before we played Dover, from the players to the supporters to the people around the place, even just walking through the town, people have been absolutely fantastic and I can’t thank them enough and we just want to repay them by doing the job the best as we can do between now and the end of the season. Yes, I am loving every minute of it so far.”

Second attempt - Lynn defender Luis Fernandez before the Boxing Day fixture against Notts County, which was postponed (Image: Ian Burt Photography)

The challenge for Widdrington and Langton, as well as first team coach Mark Hughes, is to lift Lynn from second bottom spot in the National League to safety. After Saturday’s postponed game at home to Woking, that job continues, weather permitting, in the rearranged home game against Notts County on Tuesday evening.

“When you take over at a club and you come into a club mid-season it is usually because the manager has left to go somewhere better or something isn’t working,” said Langton.

“That is not detrimental to anyone who was here before or the football club because people will come in after us and they will see things differently and think ‘I wouldn’t do that, I’ll do this’, whether it be in terms of a playing style or how they train or what the players do away from here.

“All we have done is what we believe can help the players and get more out of them, both on and off the pitch. There has been great progress - we have stopped shipping in as many goals and we are trying to play forward more, in the other team’s half, can we get the ball in their box more? So there has been a lot of progress with it. Some games we accept, like Chesterfield, they will have way more possession than us, particularly when they are at home, so it is, ‘okay - how can we frustrate them? When we win it back how can we hurt them?’ So it is a mixture of things but without a doubt from the moment I walked in here for us there has been a lot of progress.”

The company Lynn are mixing in does show how far they have progressed up the footballing ladder in recent years.

“This is the beautiful thing about this league – you have a lot of great teams in it that have come from higher levels and obviously King’s Lynn have come and are in this division with them for a reason,” said Langton.

“This league is like an old League One when you have your Stockports, your Notts Countys, your Dagenhams, all of those sort of teams. Big, big football clubs. They are the teams you want to be playing against and pitting your wits against, whether it be in the dugout or on the pitch. I hope the people of King’s Lynn who would have come (against Woking) or would have come on Boxing Day would have looked at the fixtures and thought, ‘wow, King’s Lynn are playing these kinds of teams’.

“Hopefully they can see what the manager is trying to put into here as well, and what we are trying to get out of the players, and just come and get behind the team and the club because we need these people behind us, despite the frustration of games being called off. We want as many people in the town backing us as much as we can.”