We are delighted to announce that Mick O’Connell has been appointed as Manager for the coming season. Mick joins after a magnificent spell at Harrogate Railway where in the last two seasons he has achieved play off positions but narrowly missed out on promotion from Northern Counties East Division One, on each occasion.

With him will be his Assistant Manager from Railway, Josh Walsh, who will combine the job at the Brewers with his full-time position at Harrogate Town as Youth Development Phase Lead (Player Development Centre.)

Thirty-Seven-year-old Mick started his football career in 1999 when he left his home in County Kildare for a scholarship with Nottingham Forest which then led to him moving northwards to Celtic where he learned the importance of a structured environment. He brought this to Harrogate Railway “if you can get things right on and off the pitch, you can really nail it”
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At the age of just sixteen, football made way for many years in the saddle and flat racing where he won almost 500 races until a horrendous back injury prevented him from carrying on.

Eventually, after some 30 months recovery, he was able to think about playing football again. He had a spell at Garforth before joining Railway for the first time in 2017 but his focus was changing to coaching. Mick thanks Darlington for his first real taste of Coaching with their under 18’s and 23’s before he joined the First team staff.

He returned to Railway and inherited the Managers job in 2019 just before Covid brought everything to a standstill. It was a time when avoiding another relegation was the order of the day but with Josh at his side, he turned things completely around once football returned to normality.

Both Mick and Josh felt that if they missed out on promotion this season, then they had had taken The Rail forward as far as they could . To move on was the most difficult of decisions but Tadcaster, after last season’s disaster, provided just the right sort of challenge for them both.

We welcome both Mick and Josh to Tadcaster Albion in good time for preparations in mid-June for the new season in the NCEL.