GARY MILLS claims Wrexham must get their heads around the fact that they are now an established non-league football club in their quest to get back to where they used to be.

In a rare interview on his time in north Wales, Mills insists that Wrexham was “a difficult club” who acted like they were a Football League team just guesting in the National League.

Asked why things didn’t work out at Wrexham, who sacked Mills after 18 months in charge and were believed to have a budget bigger than the one he had at Gateshead, he told York Hospital Ball podcast: “The budget wasn’t bigger than Gateshead, not at all.

“Wrexham was a difficult club. Wrexham are a big club, but it’s history and they couldn’t get it round their heads, similar to York that as in the length of time they were out of the league, that they weren’t a Football League club, they were in non-league.

“It’s the same as I said when I went to York, you’ve got to relish and realise you are in non-league, you are not a Football League club, you need to get back to being one.

“Wrexham fans couldn’t accept that to the extent where we’d win a game and still get booed off. It was so intense, it wasn’t a relaxed atmosphere, which we had at York.”

Mills also felt that unable to do his job his way, blaming the press for adding unnecessary pressure to the task of leading Wrexham back into the Football League.

At the time of his unveiling, Mills declared: “The word expectation can either frighten you or inspire you, and it inspires me.

“There is no point in doing this job if that does frighten you. I am going to relish that and I am going to work hard.”

The 58-year-old’s opinion has changed drastically in the five years that have passed.

“They didn’t really let me get on with the job my way,” he bemoaned. “It was always being interfered with. The press were immense, they were on top of you all of the time and scrutinising.

“I remember sitting with the press the day they announced I was manager, they were saying things like ‘You do know the expectation of this football club? Anything less is not enough’. Straightaway is was a tough challenge, but one that I wanted and one I set out to do.

“The time I got wasn’t enough, as in football these days. You don’t really get two years, if you haven’t achieved anything you’re out of a job.”

And Mills also claimed that he didn’t want to leave Gateshead for Wrexham in the first place, but his hand was forced.

“I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go,” he said. “The chairman said ‘I need to see you’, we used to meet in a pub near the ground every so often and sit and have a pint and a picked egg together in the corner.

“We met up and he said ‘Wrexham have come in for you, Wrexham want to speak to you’. Straightaway I said ‘I don’t want to speak to them’. I was happy, as happy as Larry.

“I said ‘I’m happy, I love it up here, we get on great’ and he said ‘no, I want you to go and speak to them Gary. I’m jacking it in, I’m leaving, I’m not doing it any more’.

“But I said ‘I don’t want to go chairman’, he went ‘well, if you do stay I’m not going to be here and the money is going to drop. Please go and speak to them, you deserve to go and speak to Wrexham’.

“I went to speak to Wrexham and I was driving back, he rings me and says ‘Gary, Tranmere want to speak to you’, I said ‘It’s incredible, right okay, I will go and speak to Tranmere’.

“I spoke to Tranmere and I spoke to Wrexham. Wrexham wanted an answer, they wanted me very quickly. Tranmere were saying they wanted me as manager but that they had a couple more interviews to do, but that I was top of the list, which is something I wasn’t really comfortable with.

“It was a weird time and I never, ever wanted to leave, but because of what the chairman said - and that’s the only reason I left Gateshead - that’s what I did, I went and spent a couple of years at Wrexham.”