Crawley Town need to go back to the drawing board - opinion

They suffered a third consecutive defeat by allowing their weaknesses to be exploited. The arrival of Tony Craig has not sorted out their defensive frailties whilst Jordan Tunnicliffe is nowhere near the form that earned him Player of the Season.

Those factors were apparent in both of Mark Cullen’s goals.

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Port Vale held sway playing with pace and an understanding that the Reds could not find as their passing was wretched.

The only bright spot was the contribution of Tyler Frost who was both best midfielder and attacker forcing Vale keeper Scott Brown to save spectacularly.

Although part of the problem was players failing to do what their manager wanted, John Yems needs to rethink his attacking strategy.

With the players he has available he must play two up top. He cannot allow the formation to negate the talents of Ashley Nadesan. The strikers need to hone their finishing skills although that will be pointless if their team mates don’t learn how to pass to them.

It’s difficult to offer an explanation for the team’s lack of form so early in the season. I couldn’t judge whether the Valiants were promotion candidates or merely better than the weak opposition they faced as Crawley let themselves down by lacking quality in anything they did.

Now the big problem for the management to handle is that losing can easily become a habit. At this stage it only needs one good performance, not to mention three points, and the atmosphere in the camp and on the field of play would be totally different.

The Reds’ narrow defeat in the EFL Trophy at Gillingham perhaps demonstrated the disdain with which Gills’ manager Steve Evans regards this competition. For long spells Crawley looked comfortably the better side but were never sharp enough in front of goal to profit from the openings they found.

The arrival of Tom Nichols from Bristol Rovers may add some punch upfront as sadly Ricky German was another to suggest that a good scoring record in non-league football is not necessarily a guarantee of success in League Two.

The first half showed that Manny Adebowale is way short of the standard required and his replacement by Tyler Frost and a change of formation meant that Crawley finally looked like making a decent fist of things. Their only bright spark had been Tarryn Allarakhia but perhaps that didn’t help him as, like Ashford in the previous game, he was quickly hooked.

As ever progress in this competition with the reward of a trip to Wembley is unlikely but the banning of spectators helpfully masks the fact that many supporters don’t particularly care.