Mellon delight at waking ‘sleeping monster’ Oldham

Micky Mellon, the manager of Oldham Athletic, claims that his “monster of a club” will awaken after earning the Latics’ first promotion in 34 years.

In the epic National League promotion final against Southend at Wembley on Sunday, Mellon’s side won two quickfire goals in extra-time.

The Scots were promoted to the EFL for the third time as manager, matching John Still’s record, and he placed sixth overall in his professional football career.

And the 53-year-old predicted that the entire club would be affected by it.

“To turn things around and get a result from where we were is an incredible achievement,” Mellon told BBC Sport. We had a wonderful time at this.

The club is “monster” Because our family supports us, we were under a lot of pressure; we had to move up.

We can really advance behind the scenes at Oldham as a football club because it changes so much about everything.

“It’s massive, it’s monstrous to get us in [the league],” he said. For the club, everything has changed. “

More than 20 000 travelling Oldham supporters gathered in a record crowd of 52, 115 in the previous promotion, which Mellon said demonstrated the gap between the National League and the EFL is narrower than ever.

He continued, “There are some really big clubs in the National League that have been allowed to stagnate.”

“York ought to have automatically risen.” You can’t win 96 points and not automatically increase. Three up and three down should be used. The EFL would be improved by teams like York and Southend.

“I believe the EFL should give its former members, who are struggling, an olive branch.”

There are teams in League Two that aren’t as ambitious or as big as those in the National League, according to me. It needs to alter, I suppose.

With only two months until the season’s opener, Mellon acknowledged that his team would be behind in terms of preparation for the coming season and anticipates that his players will return to training in as little as four weeks.

He claimed, “We are so many weeks in the hiring process. It’s absurd. In about four weeks, we’ll need to be back training. Although it will be difficult, we will undoubtedly have chosen that route.

We’ll need to sit down and make arrangements, but I’m not too let down by the decision.

We hired a lot of these boys because we thought they would be good if we moved up and that there are plenty of league players there.