Huge recruitment challenge ahead for Williamson's MK Dons

MK Dons could look significantly different come the first day of the season if Mike Williamson gets his way.

On Friday, the club confirmed five players - Warren O’Hora, Ethan Robson, Dan Kemp, Mo Eisa and Michael Kelly - would be leaving at the end of their contracts, with the six loan players - Jack Payne, Anthony Stewart, Lewis Bate, Filip Marschall, Kyran Lofthouse and Emre Tezgel - also heading back to their parent clubs.

With the majority of those regular features for Dons in the second-half of the season, it leaves Sporting Director Liam Sweeting and his team with a big job on their hands to build a squad to match Williamson’s vision.

“For us, it's a new chapter,” said the head coach. “We'll have a really new group of players, and first we have to get that recruitment right. We're working every day, probably more hours than we're on the training ground, because we know we have to get it right.

“There are so many players, the amount of opportunities, we know how important the recruitment has to be. I don't think the (recruitment team) have left since that play-off game, they're practically living here. That's the work they put in, it's relentless.”

Primarily, Williamson is eager to build a team with more backbone when under pressure. He admitted on too many occasions his side crumbled under pressure - a trait familiar to several iterations of the squad in recent years - and dropped their heads at the first setback.

Having negotiated their way to fourth place, the head coach feels though the summer will be key to further install his way of thinking and playing to make Dons a more complete entity.

He said: “We've got an opportunity now, off last season, to build. There will be so many things we don't change, but there will be so many we do too, and we know where we have to focus and how to spend our days in pre-season building resilience. We have to be better at suffering, and when we get that right, it's an exciting prospect.”

Williamson continued: “We have to be better out of possession, that's as straight as it is. We know we weren't good enough when we didn’t have the ball, we didn't suffer and didn't react well enough to setbacks. And that's where our focus has to be now.

“We have to recruit the right characters and get the right people around us, coaches, to give them the right details so when things aren't going our way, we don't change. I'm very excited for next season, as we all are.”