ADAM HINSHELWOOD will return to his old stomping grounds at Aldershot Town as York City’s manager - having once captained the Shots in the EFL.

Hinshelwood represented Aldershot 15 times in the 2009/10 season after leaving Brighton & Hove Albion, with his experience meaning that manager Gary Waddock would hand the current York boss the captain’s armband.

However, Waddock’s departure meant that incoming boss Kevin Dillon would opt to let Hinshelwood leave the club, with the 40-year-old’s time with the Shots coming to an end.

Hinshelwood is excited to return to the EBB Stadium on Saturday, with his York side currently leading the way in the Vanarama National League table after nine matches.

But the City boss is expecting a difficult challenge against an ‘expansive’ Aldershot outfit, declaring that he was under no illusions of the opponent’s strength.

“I spent a little time at Aldershot and have really fond memories from when I was a player,” Hinshelwood reminisced.

“It’ll be interesting, I can go back and see the infrastructure behind-the-scenes.

“It doesn’t look like it has changed much, there is one little stand that has been added behind one of the goals, but the rest of it remains the same.

“I was club captain for six months and really enjoyed my time there.

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“We were in League Two and competing at the top end of the table, so I have some really pleasing memories from my time there.

“Unfortunately, there was a change of manager and he didn’t fancy me too much, so we parted ways.

“It was a shame, because I thought we were onto something.

“It was a good season and a good six months, it’ll be nice to go back and hopefully see some familiar faces.”

Hinshelwood has previous experience of playing on the Aldershot pitch, and believes that the aspect of playing Solihull Moors just three days later could be a factor in any York performance.

“It’s a tough place to go and play, especially when you have Solihull [Moors] a couple of days later, they are really tough games.

“We’re under no illusions, every game at this level is a real test and a real challenge, and it will posses different challenges.

“We’ve got to be ready for those challenges, Saturday will be a different game to Tuesday, we’ve got to control what we can control and that’s our style.

“We’ll try to implement that into both games if we can, if we can play as well as we have in certain games this season, then we will be a good match for any team at this level.”

Aldershot have bagged an impressive 16 goals in their opening nine matches, proving to be a dangerous attacking threat, despite sitting in 14th position and losing key players Josh Stokes and Lorent Tolaj in the Summer.

Hinshelwood believes that it could be a match full of goals on Saturday, but hopes that his side can remain defensively strong and keep their sixth clean sheet of the season and their fourth in five matches.

Hinshelwood laughed: “On paper, there looks like there is going to be loads of goals.

“We’re really pleased with the clean sheets that we’ve kept, we’ve conceded six in nine but have five clean sheets in there as well.

“It’s something that we’re really pleased with, after ten games it would be nice to have six clean sheets from ten.

“That would be an amazing start for us, we want to try and implement that part of our game whilst at the same time, be a threat going the other way.

“It’s not easy to do, there are certain areas that we have got to improve on defensively.

“I thought that our intensity to defend our half was an error that we could improve on definitely, so we’ve been looking at that.

“At the same time, we still want to look like a threat going the other way.

“It’s about getting that balance right, and we know that Aldershot will be a tough test to see what our intensity is like.

“I think that both teams will try and play quite an expansive game, so that could leave chances for both teams.

“We’ve got to be really wary of their threats, they do play really expansively and even more so at home.

“We’ll stretch our team with them being expansive, but we’ve got to look at it the other way and see where we can exploit their spaces that might be open to us, if we’re able to break them down.”