Colin Kazim-Richards accepts the scale of the task of improving the situation at Crawley who sit bottom of League Two after seven games. But on the evidence of what he has seen, the head coach is sure better times lie ahead. On a late summer’s afternoon at Crawley’s training ground in Sussex, Kazim-Richards, alongside his assistant, Julian Gray, the pair arriving in April and managing to save the club from relegation to the National League on the final day, speaks of the challenges ahead and how the team’s league position tells only part of the story.
So loads of ins, loads of outs and trying to get over the mentality of last season. It’s not a task that is just a week, two weeks or a three-week process. You’re trying to churn out results within trying to do the process you want.
The recruitment, gelling people character-wise, mentality-wise, implementing a new structure, implementing a new standard within the club, and not just the football side. But it ultimately falls down on the results. We know that and it’s something we’re working to change.” Kazim-Richards and Gray came through the Arsenal academy, albeit at different times.
Gray was part of the first-team squad from 1996 to 2000, making a single appearance. Seven years his junior, Kazim-Richards never made it to the first team, but kept an eye on Graye. But the way he was playing, that aura, that silkiness, but also that fight.” Gray, whose clubs include Crystal Palace, Coventry and Fulham, has coached youth-level groups at Arsenal’s Hale End academy, as well as at Birmingham, another of his former clubs.
He explains how that experience is serving him at Crawley. It’s the same whatever age group. It’s my job to improve the players.
Whether it’s 1% or 10%, that depends on them. First and foremost, I have to understand them, that’s always been a big thing for me. I need to know what they need and for the best way to give them that information.” Crawley has been a place of turmoil in recent times, with John Yems, who managed the club between 2019 and 2022, receiving a three-year ban from all football-related activity by the Football Association after being found guilty of 12 breaches of anti-discrimination rules, the longest ban issued to a participant in English football for discrimination.
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