Morecambe

Last Season at a glance

Play Off winners in the Conference

Having finished third in the Conference last season, they scored victories against York and Exeter to secure their spot in the Football League for the very first time in their history.

We've always been impressed by Sammy McIlroy as a manager. It's hard to judge how he did whilst in charge of Northern Ireland, and picking up the pieces left by Carlton Palmer at Stockport County was always going to be a difficult job.

He came to the Shrimps to help out whilst then manager Jim Harvey recovered from a heart attack, but such was the job done that they decided to stick with McIlroy and they were rewarded for that last season.

McIlroy continues to have a very good reputation as both a manager and a person, though his cartwheeling skills may need a bit of work in case they are to be successful this season too.

Can you actually have a better season than one in which you secure promotion to the Football League for the first time in your club's history? We're not so sure. Even winning the Championship would probably be a better achievement, but won't capture the feelings that promotion to the Football League brings with it.

But there are signs that Morecambe will continue to improve as a football club. Matty Blinkhorn should prove to be a good signing for them, as we mention further down this page, and they were happy to break their transfer record to bring in Carl Baker from Southport.

Baker is a pacy winger who is capable of scoring goals from midfield. He grabbed 12 for Southport last season, and set up many more. Of course, there's question marks over cutting it at this level, but I doubt McIlroy would have splashed the cash had he not been confident.

There's been a couple of major departures from Morecambe over the Summer.

The main departure was striker Danny Carlton. Carlton defected to Carlisle over the Summer, and will leave a huge gap in their forward line, and that scary looking bloke who looked like was the thick baddie in Superman II has gone too.

And with just two players coming through the doors at.

It's a big season for Blinkhorn. He's been around for a few years, and was highly thought of as a youngster at Blackpool, without every really coming on as a player. He had a loan spell here and there, though there was never any real success to these.

However, his time at Morecambe last season was one of the main reasons behind their promotion to the Football League. He grabbed eight goals for the Shrimps in just twelve matches, and it was hardly a surprise that Sammy McIlroy made him one of his first signings of the Summer.

The indications are that Morecambe could be the perfect place for Blinkhorn to build on that early promise, and they'll be needing him to show that form which made him their number one Summer target.

Traditionally, we tend to write off the chances of the team who qualify for the Football League through the Play Offs system. However, we've been proved wrong on each occasion with this, especially with the Play Off winners going on to finish above the Conference Champions every time.

So we're perhaps throwing caution to the wind on this one, and sticking Morecambe down for mid table obscurity rather than tipping them to be relegated straight back down to the Conference.

When we wrote our prediction for Barnet, we talked about the advantage they would have in knowing their target for the season from day one, and reaching that fifty points total is the main priority. We see exactly the same for Morecambe as McIlroy will know the limitations of his own squad and set about it from there. I've no doubt that publicly, he'll sing a different tune and talk about as finishing as high as possible, but he'll know deep down that finishing 22nd will be a successful season, and he'll make sure that the Shrimps graft for every point.