It’s not all about the trains, but I will start there.
A trip to Cheshire and the railway town of Crewe beckons as we play against Crewe Alexandra on Saturday in our third league game of the new season. it is of course the first time we have played this opposition since that wonderful day at Wembley on the nineteen of May 2024.
Crewe is one of those places I’ve never visited, and it is the last of the ‘big five’ railway towns for me to tick off the list this weekend. Doncaster came a couple of weeks ago on the way to the Grimsby game, Swindon happened at the end of the 2022-23 season thanks to an away game. Coming from Leicester, a visit to Derby was a regular occurrence, and when young I went to York a few times, and was hoping for them to get promoted so I could go back this year.
At York I went to the National Railway Museum, and as a kid I was quite obsessed with trains, going on any steam railway available, and I had a few Loco trainspotting books over the years to tick off the trains. Along with other kids, we would play on the train tracks, dodging the diesel locomotives, and later the HST’s. At least there was no electrocution danger as the Leicester stretch of line still, forty years on, hasn’t been electrified.
Also when I was a kid, Crewe Alexandra, along with Rochdale were a side I would feel sorry for as they seemed to be permanently at the foot of Division 4 and having to apply for re-election to the league each season, and for years afterwards I would always look out for their results and fortunes. More recently I was surprised that these two clubs were the top two in the list of most applications for re-election as my mind had told me, two of the sides who weren’t re-elected – Barrow and Southport, and two who have subsequently been relegated – Hartlepool and Halifax Town had more applications.
In my late teens and early twenties I was friends with a Crewe Alexandra fan. He was also a Kev, and I knew him from the local pool league in Thurmaston (just north of Leicester). He used to write a weekly magazine and sell them for 50p in the village. It was a strange cross between a local Heat magazine, Shoot!, and Socialist Worker. I haven’t thought about that for a long time and am now wondering if anyone I still know from back then kept any copies of it. In retrospect it was a shame that none of us ever took him up on the offer to go to a Crewe Alexandra game with him.
In total this will be the twenty-second game against Crewe Alexandra. Outside of the above game at a neutral venue, our record against Crewe Alexandra is not particularly good, in the other twenty game we have only won three, drawn five, and lost twelve. The away record makes even worse reading, with a single victory, two draws and seven defeats.
Out first games against Crewe Alexandra were in 2011-12 season in our first season in the Football League, and we drew both games 1-1 with Matt Tubbs scoring in the away game in December, and Gary Alexander scoring from the penalty spot in the home return in April.
Crewe Alexandra were one of the other promoted sides with us that season, going up through the playoffs after scraping into the playoffs by finishing seventh, and during the season we beat them at home and lost to them at Gresty Road.
We played them in League One for the next two seasons, and I had recently bought a batch of Crawley Town home programmes from the 2012-13 season and was having a poke around in there hoping to get the Crewe Alexander game one, only to find that it is one of only two from the whole season which weren’t included.
Our last (and only) win away against Crewe Alexandra came in December 2016 in a 2-0 win, with both goals from James Collins. In a quirk of the schedules compared to this season, it was a week before a home fixture against Newport County, and there was a cup game in between the two as well with a Sussex Senior Cup third round win over Horsham YMCA. Crewe Alexandra did get their revenge in a 3-0 in the return fixture in March 2017.
It was interesting looking at the comings and goings before that season. The chaos of the last three off seasons are nothing new it would appear, as over the summer of 2016 we released or transferred seventeen players (only one for a fee), and brought in sixteen, all of which were free transfers or loanees.
The following season’s saw us lose both home and away, but the following year saw our biggest win against them as we beat them 3-0. Only for Crewe Alexandra to gain their revenge in the return fixture in spectacular fashion with a 6-1 drubbing in mid-March, after Ollie Palmer had opened the scoring for us from the penalty spot. We were already 5-1 down by the time Ibrahim Meite was sent off for us. I can’t imagine all seventy-nine fans who made the trip stayed to the bitter end of that one.
The next three games saw three losses before a 2-2 draw in March 2023, where we went ahead in the first half courtesy of an own goal, then went behind, for Ben Gladwin to get an equaliser in the 97th minute in one of those roller coaster of emotion games as we were desperately scrabbling for points to stay out of the relegation zone, the late equaliser felt like a win, although hundreds won’t have seen it as they’d already gone. (The programme below shows Jack Powell in our squad, and he is now at Crewe Alexandra.)
In our promotion season, we lost both league encounters against Crewe Alexandra, 4-2 at home and 1-0 away. But at Wembley it was a case of third time is the charm, as goals from Danilo Orsi and Liam Kelly saw us gain promotion.
Elsewhere I have also managed to find a couple of cards from the 1991-92 season for Crewe Alexandra players, with Mark Gardiner and Phil Clarkson, although with retrospect Proset probably wish they had gone for some of the youngsters of the squad that year, which included Rob Jones, Craig Hignett, and Neil Lennon.
Apart from Crewe Alexandra, one of the other two Cheshire sides we have played more than a season against is Northwich Victoria. Cheshire were a Northern League county, and so although we played games in Shropshire and Staffordshire, including against Leek Town who are further north than Crewe, we didn’t play a game against Cheshire competition until 2004.
That first game against Northwich Victoria came in October 2004 with a goalless draw at the Broadfield Stadium. The return fixture was a 1-0 away loss in the final game of the season at the end of April.
Northwich Victoria were relegated that season, but were back for the 2006-07 season, and we played against them for the next three seasons, losing three and winning three, with a victory in the last of those seasons in Cheshire (one of only two).
It was interesting looking through that 2004 programme as it was eighteen months before I even moved to Crawley. I do find older programmes fascinating, not just from the football side, but from the snapshot in time of local history. There is a page of adverts in there which has the Ocean Trawler, which I walk past nearly every day now, and the Half Moon which I rarely frequent but see going to any home game. Most of the local advertisers are still going strong. Yet by the time we get to the 2023 example included above, the local advertisers had disappeared from the programme, being replaced by generic big brands – Sky Bet, eBay, Unilever, and Cazoo, much to the detriment of the character of a programme, and possibly something that helped its demise.
We also seem to go out of our way to avoid other Cheshire clubs. We were due to play Chester City in the Conference in the 2009-10 season, but they were expelled and results expunged before we got to play them (as the games had been scheduled for March and April). And we only had the one season playing Macclesfield Town when we were promoted into the Football League before we were promoted and they slipped into the Conference the following season, we managed a nice early season 2-0 win in our first ever home EFL game, with goals from Tyrone Barnett and Wes Thomas, but still failed to win in Cheshire, drawing 2-2. They returned for 2018-19 (a home draw and an away loss), and we had an away draw against them the following season, only for the home game to be one of those lost to COVID at the end of the 2019-20 season, after which they were relegated and went out of business later that year.
Playing against Cheshire sides is probably not a good thing with our terrible record in the county. Here’s hoping for an improvement there at the weekend.