JOHN Coleman says there has never been a better time to be at Accrington Stanley than now, after he and assistant manager Jimmy Bell signed new four-year contracts.

Coleman, who was in charge for 13 years in his first spell with the club, celebrated the fourth anniversary of his second stint last week.

And he admitted he had no hesitation in signing a new long-term deal, with the club making progress both on the field - after securing a fourth promotion with the Reds last season - and off the field - with a new stand nearing completion and and planning permission granted for a training ground.

“It wasn’t a difficult decision to make,” said Coleman, who has taken Accrington from the UniBond First Division to League One.

“We’ve spoken about this for the last six months, and I think myself and (chairman) Andy Holt are on the same page. We want what’s best for the club and we’ll do what we think is best for the club every time we make decisions regarding the football club.

“It’s a good club and there’s never been a better time to be at this club than right now, and that’s for the fruits of a lot of labour from a lot of different people to enable us to be in this situation. Not just Andy Holt, who’s done brilliantly, but the people who have kept the club afloat when times were really bad.

“We really want to move the club onto another level as regards the structure and hopefully the emergence of the new training ground will be the cherry on the top. If we can get that done we’ll start to enjoy the fruits of our hard work by being able to finally compete with other teams on a level playing field by having a training ground.

“That’s something that we craved since myself and Jimmy walked through the door in 1999 so it’s been a long time coming.”

Coleman added: “Andy Holt’s making great strides but I think he’s prioritising, and rightly so.

“I think one of the big things that had to be prioritised was the treatment of the fans, both in the facilities and the way they are communicated with. I think that’s been a massive improvement, probably the biggest improvement, and I think fans of other clubs are very envious of the relationship our fans have with our chairman because he’s quite transparent and he wants to garner their views before he makes decisions, so they feel valued.

“The actual playing facilities are improving. Again you’re prioritising and the big priority was the pitch, which has improved no end. After you do that you start making the next step which would be the training ground, and then after that probably the changing rooms.

“But it’s a slow process, you can’t do it overnight with what you get through the gate.”

Progression through the divisions has been steady and carefully crafted too.

Stanley were a part-time outfit when Coleman and Bell first came to the club in 1999, but having won promotion to the Conference in 2003 they turned full-time a year later and went on to secure a long-awaited return to the Football League in 2006.

The Reds had a near miss with the League Two play-offs in 2010/11, the season after which Coleman left for Rochdale, returning in September 2014 via spells in charge of Southport and Sligo Rovers.

Four years later he engineered the fourth promotion that he always believed they were capable of. And he hasn’t ruled out more yet.

“At the time possibly we’d have been delighted in going up to the Conference, let alone League One. But you can’t put a ceiling on your ambitions, you should never do that," he added.

“Who knows, maybe there are more fairytales to come.”

Coleman admits he has experienced his fair share of worries at the former Crown Ground during half a decade of severe financial difficulties, including unpaid tax bills, unpaid wages and the serving of a winding up order on more than one occasion.

There were times over a period of “probably four of five years” that Coleman wondered whether the club could survive.

It was out of his hands. His job was to make sure the players kept performing no matter what.

“There are a few ways you can approach this, but when you know that you’ve got to tell the players they’re not going to get paid the day before they should get paid it can have a really demoralising affect on the players. You’ve got to somehow turn that around into your favour,” he explained.

“It got beyond the realms of realism because we seemed to thrive when we didn’t get paid, and sometimes you were half hoping that you wouldn’t get paid because you’d win the next day. It sounds stupid.

“You had to galvanise the lads some other way and make it as though it wasn’t their job but a vocation.

“It still is their job, you’ve still got to put food on the table and pay the mortgage. But for that 90 minutes you had to change the emphasis.”

It is an approach Coleman has been keen to maintain despite the benefit of a sounder financial footing.

“One of the key things we’ve had here, myself Jimmy and (first-team coach) John Doolan, is we’ve always tried to instil an ethos that it’s for the love of the game, for playing,” he added.

“I know myself as a player, and I only played part-time, but we earned decent money in non-league. I have this thing where if you pull a player and ask them ‘I can pay you or play you, what would you choose?’, I’d like to think most of ours would say play. I would play all day long.

“I think we’ve got that ethos at our club now, and I think we had to have that at the times when we were in danger of not being paid. But now that that has dissipated that same hunger to play has got to be there, and I think that’s possibly why we’ve been as successful as we have, that that feeling is still ongoing and it still gets fostered here.”