It's great to be back in football, says new Chesterfield boss Gary Caldwell

Caldwell was sacked by Wigan in October after leading them into the Championship the previous season – his first as a manager.

Caldwell, who captained the side to the FA Cup final victory against Manchester City in 2013, said of his short break out of game: “You do miss it.

“Every day you wake up when you are not working and think, what am I going to do today?

There is only so long that you can go to the gym for. That ‘I am going to get fit’ phase wears off pretty quickly.

Then you go through the phase of thinking what to do. You try to watch a bit of football but the motivation is pretty low to do that because there is nothing at the end of it.

“As soon as this opportunity came and I got the job, the motivation goes right up again to 100%.

“You start watching football again, you are back thinking of training, preparing for training and preparing for games. You go from zero to 100 very quickly and it is great to be back.

No day off for players, despite blank weekendCaldwell respects O’Shea’s decision to leave“I thoroughly enjoyed the game last Saturday (a goalless draw against AFC Wimbledon) and I enjoyed analysing that and working on it and seeing how we could get better and improve – and preparing training for the week to try to do that.”

Caldwell said he would be expecting hard work from all of his players in the days, weeks and months ahead.

“Hard work is the starting point of anything. If you want to be successful you have got to be willing to work hard,” he said.

“As a manager I don’t know how other people see me, but I think I am pretty fair. I am honest with people. I will tell them if they are not doing it, probably quite aggressively sometimes.

“But overall, day-to-day, I hope I am pretty easy-going. I set standards about a football club but I like to think that people enjoy coming into work in the environment that I try to create.”