Hayes & Yeading saw their three-year spell in the top level of non-league football come to an end and in a way the writing was on the wall for the modest Middlesex outfit from the start of the season. They moved from their ground to Woking's Kingfield Stadium, in a ground-share, at the start and this forced a big decrease in already one of the smallest budgets in the division. That forced successful manager Gary Haylock, the man in the centre of all the club's upturn in fourtunes in the last four years, to leave the club and in came Reading's academy coach Nas Bashir who was taking his first job as a first-team manager. He basically built a squad from scratch with only Tom Cadmore and Jamie Hand staying on from the previous season and the team had a mix of experience and academy players from bigger clubs in the area. The start of the season was decent enough with some very respectable performances mixed with very poor ones, especially in defence. The team lacked consistency and this remained a feature throughout the campaign with the extremely high turnover of players. The style of football, neat and intricate passing on the deck, remained the same though and when the team clicked, it was great to watch. This happened only once in a while though and by late September Hayes were in the bottom four and very rarely steered out of it for the rest of the season. They went on a particularly bad run from October to January when they won only one out of 14 games and lost 11 of them. Four wins in the next eight games raised the hopes of a revival but with top scorer and best player, Louie Soares, departing to Grimsby in late January, most of the goals dried and the other players struggled to fill the gap. Nevertheless, Bashir's side kept a gap to a bridgeable degree with games running out and a superb 2:1 win at Southport really gave the players belief. However, they lost to top teams Luton and Mansfield after that and eventually were relegated with a week of the season left. Bashir deserves credit for sticking to his commendable principles but the fact that he never had a settled team and the defence always looked likely to concede a hatful of goals proved burdens too big.
