MACKENZIE Brown is looking forward to picking up the cudgels again after returning to the managerial hotseat at Millbrook following a six-month break.

Brown stood down in early January when the club were firmly in the South West Peninsula League Premier East promotion race and had reached the quarter-finals of two cup competitions to spend more time with his young family.

His assistant, Mike Heron, did an impressive job in his absence, taking Brook into the semi-finals of the League Cup and Cornwall Senior Cup, but Brown is now back at the helm, with Heron once more his right-hand man.

‘I am looking forward to it again,’ said Brown.

‘I have kept my eye on it since Christmas when I stepped down.

‘I am so close to all of the players, and Mike who stepped in is a really good friend of mine, and he would ask my opinions on things here and there, and I was also still going down to watch some games, but come the end of the season, I didn’t think it was something that I would get back into.

‘I did miss it, but for the four or five months while I was stopped, I took the time to work out what I actually wanted to do. I had a couple of opportunities to go and do some work with kids’ football, but in the end I just missed everything about men’s football, particularly Millbrook.

‘We have built something over the last four or five years, and in the back of my mind I was concerned it might just disperse and the players would leave.

‘Pratts (chairman Mark Pratten) then asked me if I would be interested in coming back.

‘It makes a massive difference with my son (Frankie) being aged two now, and not one or 18 months.

‘In hindsight, I should have walked away last summer because it was all too much, but I kept going as long as I could.

‘I think if that had happened then maybe the players would have all gone elsewhere, and while it might have been the right thing for me to walk away then, it would have been bad for the club, but in the end everybody stuck together, the players stepped up massively after Christmas, got themselves into two semi-finals and it has all worked out and I now feel re-energised to go again.’

He added: ‘The work Mark has done at the club is unbelievable, with the refurbishment of the clubhouse, and it is a club that is moving forward, and I am looking forward to getting started again.’

One disappointment for Brown is that the League have now decided not to complete last season’s Walter C Parson League Cup competition, where Brook were looking forward to playing their outstanding semi-final against Elmore this month.

‘It is a shame, and they talked about how difficult it would be to fit in all the fixtures, but for me it would have made sense to finish the 2019-20 cup competition this coming season,’ he said.

‘The same with the Senior Cup as well. There is just our semi-final to play against Saltash, with Torpoint already in the final – just two matches to play, so I can’t understand why it can’t be finished.

‘It just seems a little bit harsh for all the clubs still involved in both competitions really that they can’t make it work for the sake of a few games.’

The Millbrook players wanted to target the cups last season, but there is likely to be a slight change of focus this time around.

‘I think our targets are going to be league orientated this year, and we want to really put on a bit of a title challenge and that is going to be our aim, but we will see,’ he said.

‘The difficulty at our level is that you don’t really know what other clubs are doing, apart from reading their social media.

‘There might be a team that are sitting back in the shadows, have made some really good signings and done some really good work in pre-season, and they might take the league by storm.

‘My aim every summer is keeping hold of what I have already got, and if I can do that, then that is part one already done, because if I am losing players, then I am losing some of the best players in the league.

‘If we can keep hold of pretty much everybody, and make one or two additions – and we have signed Lee Robinson from Callington, who I think is going to be a really good addition for us and fits into what we are, a young lad keen to learn and improve – then that is the aim.

‘I think the league will be stronger this year than last year, and it will be a case of who can have a level of consistency to put in a challenge.’

During lockdown, Brown was not putting his feet up. He raised a superb £1,500-plus for the Dreadnought Centre – a registered charity working with young people and their families who are experiencing difficulties in their lives, be it emotional, behavioural or physical.

He did it by running 30 miles around Millbrook lake and Millbrook Football Club – the total distance was 31 miles (50k) in the end – in five-and-a-half hours, with Brook player-coach Ben Applegate joining him for the whole run.

‘I chose to do the same route 30 times as I thought that would add a new mental dimension to the challenge, but on the day I didn’t find it a problem at all, because I had so many people dipping in and out of the run with me,’ explained schoolteacher Brown.

‘It was actually a lot harder physically than I thought it was going to be, and a lot easier mentally, which surprised me.’

He added: ‘I expected a few friends to come down and have a look at what was going on, but there wasn’t one lap I ran on my own, and a good friend of mine, Ben Applegate, did it with me, and he is a fitness freak anyway!

‘The last six or seven miles were just painful, and I had about 10 to 12 different people who joined in, and for the last five or six miles there were eight or nine of us running, so the support I got was fantastic.’