YORK City’s veteran striker Jon Parkin has no plans to hang his boots up this summer.

Parkin, 36, signed a contract extension for 2018/19 midway through this season, before being sidelined for five weeks at the business end of the campaign due to knee surgery.

He still finished the campaign as City’s runaway top scorer with 25 goals and returned to action as a second-half substitute during Saturday’s season-ending 2-0 defeat at Brackley.

Admitting his hunger for the game and for success with the Minstermen remains undiminished, Parkin said: “I 100 per cent want to carry on. I

played the last 40 minutes on Saturday and, whilst I didn’t enjoy the result, I thoroughly enjoyed being back out there.

“I’ve still got the hunger and I want to succeed for this football club.”

Despite a season in which he won a glut of individual awards, including The Press Player of the Year prize, Parkin also feels partly culpable for the team’s failure to even reach the National League North play-offs.

The side finished a lowly 11th in the table, taking one point from a possible 18 during the final six matches and, reflecting on the campaign’s disappointments, Parkin reasoned: “I don’t think it’s really my place to say what I think has gone wrong with X, Y or Z but, whatever we have done has not been good enough, myself included.

“Ultimately, we have failed. We were set up for promotion and got nowhere near.

“It’s been a disappointing season and, even before my injury, I don’t think we should have been in a position where there was a possibility we could slip out of the play-offs.”

Parkin’s continued goalscoring desire and commitment to the City cause was witnessed at Brackley with an emotional reaction to his headed goal – both when it hit the net and after it was disallowed.

At the time, the former Stoke and Hull forward thought his equalising effort might still keep alive City’s outside chance of securing a top-seven spot and, on the decision to rule it out, Parkin added: “The referee said I pushed their player and I couldn’t believe it.

“When I scored, I don’t think anybody appealed for it and, if I said what I really thought about it, I’d get in trouble, so I’ll have to bite my lip.”

Parkin hit a series of club landmarks during the campaign due to his goalscoring exploits.

His haul of 36 in 2017 was the highest City total for a calendar year during the post-War era.

He also set a new club record after netting in eight consecutive home matches and grabbed the Minstermen’s first hat-trick in eight seasons at North Ferriby on Boxing Day.

Whilst his enduring joy at scoring is evident for all to see, though, Parkin would surrender all individual plaudits for a happier campaign for the club next term.

“With the games I missed, had I carried on the way I was, I’d have got 35 goals maybe this season but, as I’ve said before, it’s not about me scoring goals. It’s about this team winning matches,” he pointed out. “If I’m scoring goals in the meantime, then happy days, but I’d rather not score a goal next season and we get promoted.

“All the awards are nice as well, but I’d swap them all for a promotion.”

Parkin went on to confess that he returned to action ahead of schedule at the weekend, because City still harboured a small chance of gate-crashing the play-offs.

“I was probably two weeks away from being ready but, with us still having a chance, I spoke to the physio and he was happy that there would be no more damage to my knee, so I thought I’d give it a go,” the Barnsley-born marksman explained. “It was supposed to be the last ten or 15 minutes if everything was going for us, but it ended up being a bit sooner after they went in front.

“Our fans were next to the dugout, so we knew at half-time that everybody was losing. It turned out that our result would not have mattered, but it was still a disappointing end.”