Within a week of collecting the Welsh Premier League’s Manager of the Season award for the third year in a row, Craig Harrison is gone from Welsh football and his hugely successful tenure at The New Saints has come to an end.
After praising his backroom staff and rival managers in a fashion we’ve become accustomed to from Harrison upon receiving his latest accolade, he was politely noncommittal about where his future might lie at the league’s annual award dinner.
As it proved, the challenge of resurrecting fallen Hartlepool United in his native north-east was one he simply could not pass.
“It is hard to leave TNS but I have worked very, very hard to get the opportunity to move to such a club like Hartlepool,” Harrison told Hartlepool’s official website.
“It has been a long time coming and is something I must admit that, probably 15 years ago, I didn’t see coming after I had finished playing football when I went through a really tough time away from the game.”
After a season in which his team set a Guinness World Record – breaking a 44-year-old record set by Ajax – for a famed 27-game winning run, TNS were 13-minutes away from completing a unique ‘treble treble’.
Having sewn up a sixth consecutive league title with ease and the League Cup already long-secure from their 4-0 win over Barry Town back in January, Harrison’s Saints were leading in the Welsh Cup final against Bala Town until deep into the second-half.
Despite being denied another clean sweep by Bala’s romantic Cup victory, it was becoming increasingly apparent that Craig Harrison had exhausted all there was to achieve domestically.
Since being joining the club in December 2011 from Airbus UK Broughton, Harrison has won six WPL titles, four Welsh Cups and three League Cups.
When discussing his future in an interview for Dai-Sport after first being linked to the Hartlepool job, Harrison reiterated his desire to manage at the highest possible level: “That’s the situation whether it be anybody. It’s obviously nice it’s Hartlepool but it could be anybody. It could be next week, it could be two weeks, it could six months, it could be two years, it could be six years.
“I want to try and manage the highest levels I can and that’s what I want to do.”
You sense that he would have ideally liked to have given the Champions League qualifying campaign another crack this summer as making that breakthrough in Europe was the biggest challenge facing Harrison at TNS and Dundalk’s recent accomplishments in the Europa League, a club hailing from a league of similar stature to the WPL, will not have been lost on him.
When observing TNS, given their dominance in the WPL, it sometimes feels that the small out-of-season summer window in which the European qualifying rounds are played were the most significant period of their season and given their sheer strength-in-depth, I’ve sometimes wondered whether inner-squad training matches are actually more competitive than their actual league fixtures.
The New Saints’ superiority and professional advantage over the rest of the league should in no way diminish Harrison’s achievements however. Football matches never have or never will be decided on paper and the fact that TNS have continually met and surpassed their own standards over such a prolonged period are of credit to Harrison and his team.
I can’t remember a single occasion when a Craig Harrison TNS side approached a game against a clear underdog in a nonchalant manner and disrespected them, expecting the points to just fall into their pocket. His constant rotating of the Saints squad also ensured his players never got too comfortable in their spot in the team and that there was always a player of equal ability waiting to come in and snatch his place.
The challenge that will now be facing Harrison at Hartlepool will be turned on its head when compared to TNS. At Hartlepool there’ll now be the remains of a squad who evidently weren’t good enough following their relegation out of the league and he will now need to build and instill a winning mentality instead of sustaining it and preventing complacency from creeping in.
At a club where a number of more recognised managers possessing more experienced CVs have failed, Craig Harrison will get all the challenge he wanted and more at Hartlepool United.
My only regret in seeing him depart Welsh football is that he deserved the opportunity to move to a club on a better footing, already in the Football League. Perhaps his opportunities have suffered from the stigma that still seems to be placed on the league from sections of the professional game, but Harrison has never been one to complain.
He leaves behind a legacy at TNS and his decision to move on is a loss for Welsh domestic football. Time will tell whether he left for the right club but don’t be surprised to see Craig Harrison succeed where others with more established reputations have failed.
