BY David Warman

CHAIRMAN Stewart Day insists the move to Manchester City’s old training complex at Carrington has already helped Bury in their quest towards the Championship.

The Shakers gained promotion from League Two on the final day of the season with a 1-0 win at Tranmere to secure their return to the third tier following a two-year absence.

Day, aged 33, is now busy preparing for the next campaign but yesterday took time out to show ITV Granada’s Chris Hall around their new training base.

He told Hall that the move to Carrington in March was the catalyst for their late-season march into the top three.

“It’s fantastic facilities that we’ve inherited here at Carrington," he said.

"I think it’s had a real push on us getting the promotion as we won 13 of the 16 games since we moved in.

"It’s a great facility in terms of where we were at.

"We had one pitch at Lower Gigg and now we’ve got a choice of six.

"The biggest problem the manager has is actually getting them off the training pitch.

“We even had a situation where the (Manchester City) name plates were on the car parking spaces and the lads were rushing to get here so they could park in certain bays before others.”

After moving into their new training ground in February, Bury went on to collect 39 points out of the remaining 48 available to them, overturning a 10-point gap between themselves and Wycombe Wanderers to land the final automatic promotion place.

The Shakers also kept 11 clean sheets in the final 16 games of the campaign, three more than they managed to keep in their opening 30 league matches.

Having achieved automatic promotion in David Flitcroft’s first full season in charge, the Shakers now go into the League One campaign with arguably the best training base in the division.

And Day believes that has put the club in a great position to push on to further success.

“Sometimes you’ve got to speculate in a business and you have got to take one or two calculated risks," he said.

"It has cost a lot of money to get us where we wanted to be because the club wasn’t in a great position previously.

“I’ve got an incredible relationship with the manager, the coaching staff and the players. What we’re trying to do now is build something that does become sustainable.

“The ambition for us is to try and push towards getting into the Championship and that is our aim.”