In the hours leading up to the kick off to this season it would be safe to say outside of the dressing room, the confidence about how the season would go wasn’t high. Crawley Town had a terrible 2022-23 season and only just escaped relegation with a game to go.
We could have named an eighteen-man squad from players who had departed from the club in the previous twelve months. A lot of the fan favourites had gone. And a lot of replacements had come in. Although a lot them had had league experience previously, we had signed the majority of them from non-league clubs. It didn’t inspire confidence.
Off the pitch was a mixed bag as well. There had been improvements in the match day experience. Season ticket prices, reduced the season before, had been held at the same level (which has contributed to the continued increase in home and away support). The Fanzone was up and running, and there are more food and drink options in and around the ground. Yet to some fans there was disgust (definitely mine), the programme had been scrapped. Completely, not even online. And for the second season running the new kits weren’t available before the season started.
The bookies had us as favourites for relegation. Both Four Four Two and When Saturday Comes predicted we would finish rock bottom of League 2.
And then we kicked off. A home game opener for the first time in six years. And a win against the team WAGMI tried to buy before taking us over – Bradford City. With it, the glorious sight of Mark Hughes throwing his toys out of the pram on our touchline. Again.
There was a quick exit in the Carabao Cup away at Exeter City, a contrast to the only real bright spot of the previous season in the same competition where we got to the third round and beat Premier League Fulham along the way.
The new players gelled quickly, and it looked and felt a lot better on the pitch. The grumbling about the wholesale changes of personnel gave way to an acknowledgement the players who had gone over the summer were those on the pitch as we finished twenty-second last season, and therefore them going wasn’t necessarily the terrible thing we had thought it to be.
After the good start, however, came a thumping away 0-6 at Swindon Town following a 0-1 defeat to early leaders Gillingham. But after that we went on a great, and on the whole, unexpected run. We played more attacking football, created chances, scored goals, and picked up points. And towards the end of September, we were top of the league for about eight minutes on goal difference. Not long enough to get a screen grab of it for posterity though.
Then came a dreadful October. Gillingham sacked Neil Harris and our manager Scott Lindsey was closely linked with the vacancy. The saga went on for a while, and it seemed to affect the team and we only picked up a single point in six games during the month, and then went out of the FA Cup in the first round away to Notts County the first weekend in November.
Since then, it was a case of win one, lose one, or win a couple, lose a couple. We are scoring goals in most games, but at the same time, we are conceding goals in most games as well. It is exciting, but not necessarily particularly good for the nerves. But since the turn of the year the form hasn’t been great, and we’ve had postponements and have slipped into the bottom half of the table and out of playoff contention (but not mathematically, so there is always hope).
We have picked up a lot of bookings. The team is relatively inexperienced. They are getting drawn in, falling for the gamesmanship that more experience brings, they are getting bullied off the ball far too often. We have a lot of possession but play ourselves into trouble trying to play out. We create chances, but the shot accuracy isn’t great.
The transfer window was always going to be a worry. Scott Lindsey mentioned he expected there to be changes. But there has been no indication from the owners about how much they were willing to back the team with incoming players. There has been pretty much complete radio silence from WAGMI this season. After last January’s window, where we lost some of players, including out to relegation rivals, back to parent clubs, or out on loan for off field reasons, there is an anxiety about losing players.
For me Liam Kelly, Klaidi Lolos, Danilo Orsi, and Nick Tsaroulla would have been players we couldn’t afford to lose, and we didn’t. There were many other players who divide opinion. Some of our loan players went go back to parent clubs due to the lack of playing time. And we got a couple of new signings in the last couple of hours of the window, a central defender, and a midfielder, but attempts to get an additional striker fell short.
Looking forward, is a play-off place a realistic expectation? Blind faith would say why not? We were close, and aren’t that far away on points, but are probably a couple of players short of being able to make it. In a pre-season piece, I went with what felt like an optimistic prediction of fourteenth and a bit of a cup run. We have had the latter in the Bristol Street Motors Trophy, making the third round for the first time in our history, beating a couple of League 1 teams along the way before losing to Peterborough. And I’m going to upgrade my prediction to a top half finish for us but missing out on the playoffs. Our recent form hasn’t been great, but up is where I’m looking, and not down, getting dragged into another relegation battle is unlikely.
Come on you reds.