Chester were looking towards the new season with anticipation and hope that they are closer to the play-off places and have a more exciting seasons as a whole. They had a pretty positive opening month of the season as Steve Burr lead them to a few good wins and just one loss in the first seven games. They pulled off good away wins at local rivals Halifax and Macclesfield during that period and the expectations of the fans were naturally raised. The team had a solid, blue-collar look about it as creativity and flair were not in great supply but the team looked tigerish and determined to fight for every point. But the positive start soon started to fade and the Cheshire side would descend into one of the more mediocre and forgettable sides in the league. Their form never really hit a truly awful patch and Burr was still able to extract some good performances from here and there. Yet they were and the team started to slide down the table slowly but surely. They lost six out of the next nine games but did enjoy a dramatic derby win over Wrexham in one of their few high points of the season. An improved run in the weeks after that kept them clear of the drop zone but Chester were the typical mid-table side that never looked capable of breaking into the top ten. Ross Hannah was the one outstanding success of their transfer business over the summer as the former Grimsby striker relished regular playing time and a central role and scored with impressive regularity. He was backed well in midfield by Luke George but the latter endured an injury-hit campaign and never really showed his potential. Ian Sharps looked slow and cumbersome at the back too often but was maintained as a regular in the side while the creative force of the previous two seasons, John Rooney, was having a poor season by his standards. Hannah was scarcely backed up front too and things were certainly not looking bright for Chester at the halfway point of the season. They secured comfortable wins against poor teams like Kidderminster and Torquay but were getting turned over by anyone half-decent and started to move closer and closer to the bottom four after the turn of the year. The win over Torquay was their only one in a stretch of 11 outings and they also went seven games without a victory in the spring. Burr signed some decent players over the course of the season in Ryan Lloyd, Ryan Astles and James Alabi but none of them had the sort of impact to change the overall course of Chester’s season. They were just not good enough for this level and were creating too few chances. They still enjoyed an absolutely brilliant 8:1 win over Aldershot in March, a result that came out of nowhere, and that showed that there was indeed potential in this side. But Burr was sacked merely out weeks later as a costly loss to direct rivals Torquay left the Seals hanging by a thread over the bottom four. Assistant Jon McCarthy took over for the final few games and even he lost his first game in charge too, he secured the necessary points to secure another season at this level, getting a surprise away win at Grimsby. That proved enough for him to win the job on permanent basis for next season but it has to be said that things are not looking too rosy for Chester at their current state.
