Hyde look back on an absolutely terrible season which saw them break all kinds of negative records as they suffered relegation to the Conference North. The small Cheshire club did well to survive in its first campaign after promotion and the hopes were for consolidation and progress at the start of the season. Scott McNiven kept the nucleus of the squad and added a few new players that seemed an upgrade on the departed ones. Yet, things started in the worst imaginable way with an absolute annihilation suffered at Forest Green. The 8:0 loss on the opening day really knocked the stuffing out of the players and proved to have profound effects on the mentality of the players for the rest of the season. They got a couple of battling draws in the games after that but the Tigers struggled to get any wins on board and were anchored to the bottom of the table right from the start. They actually played some decent football and should have secured much more points in these early weeks and months of the season. Yet, they contrived to concede late goals from innocuous situations and that further impacted their confidence and conviction. McNiven stuck to his principles of playing good, attacking football but the extreme naivety and vulnerability at the back was makings things very hard for the team as a whole. A game in October at relegation rivals, Dartford, seemed to encapsulate the capacity of the side to keep shooting themselves in the foot. They were much the better side in the game and looked to have pulled off a great win after coming back from two goals down to take a 3:2 lead. Yet, they somehow conceded two improbable goals right at the death and ended up losing a game in the most dramatic and demoralising of ways despite being clearly the better side. That loss maintained the vicious circle and Hyde went on a barely believable run of one point gained in a run of 22 games from September to January. Relegation already looked absolutely certain by the turn of the year and the rest of the season was a rather sad trudge towards its completion. The club allowed some stalwarts in the squad to leave in order to ease the wage burden and McNiven had to use a very young squad of players in the spring, filled with constant loan additions. The Tigers did manage their sole win of the entire season at Welling in January, when the team had a bit of an upturn, but the final points tally of 10 points is absolutely unacceptable and made a real mockery of the pre-season expectations of progress. Relegation was confirmed in record time, in early March, and the team gained just a single point from the last 11 games of a truly wretched season. It is hard to put your finger on what precisely went wrong in this team but they just seemed to be collectively too weak, mentally, and the manager lacked the necessary nous and know-how in terms of dealing with the crisis. The aim for next season is to try to rebuild confidence and stabilise in the Conference North.
