Crawley Town verdict: Midfield needs boost in transfer window after day when everything went wrong

Crawley Town fan and columnist Alain Harper

It was a shadow of the team that fought so bravely at Mansfield a few days earlier, whether it was getting back to Crawley at 4am that the team was so lethargic or just one of those days when nothing went right.

Take nothing away from Port Vale, they did a job on the Red Devils and showed battling spirit that we couldn’t match.

Dominic Poleon and Ollie Palmer had games to forget, they did have a couple of chances which normally they would have taken, but like of late didn’t capitalize on them.

The winning goal came from a breakaway, one end of the pitch to the other, the defence went missing and Ricky Miller put it away at the second attempt.

New signing Ricky German came on as a late substitute which gave the supporters a short glimpse of his statue but had no time really to get involved in the game.

The midfield had a bad day – Filipe Morais was more intent of giving fouls away and certainly looked off form, his fitness level was far below that of earlier in the season, two or three times he was out-run to the ball just a few yards in front of him.

Dannie Bulman did his best and kept battling but you could see that he is starting to struggle with the pace of the game.

The supporters are quite right to ask about strengthening the midfield, we desperately need a ball-winning player and we need to have two wide players to feed Palmer and Poleon as they were constantly running out wide with nothing in the middle.

You saw how much difference it made when Luke Gambin was brought on, but by then it was too little too late.

The club have announced a Fans’ Forum on February 11 where Gabriele Cioffe, Nathan Rooney and Selim Gaygusuz will be answering the fans questions, there will be some awkward ones asked and I hope that they can come up with some re-assuring answers.

We still have two weeks to go in the transfer window, let’s all hope that we can strengthen the team in this period because like it or not we could soon be dragged into a relegation dog fight again for the third season running.

Oh, I have found a positive to take from the game – the pitch, it is in excellent condition and well done the ground maintenance staff for this, it is the best we have seen in a number of season.

Away travel

Well done to the 24 supporters who made the effort to travel to Mansfield, and hopefully you all made it home successfully after all the diversions on the M1 and M25.

It’s the last thing you want having watch the team lose with goal scored in the 88th minute.

We can confirm the stop on the way to Swindon this Saturday, The Tally Ho – near Hungerford just 800 yards off the M4 at junction 14, about 20 minutes from Swindon.

We depart from the stadium at 10.30am, cost is £20.00 which includes the buffet. We have seats on the coach available at the moment but surprisingly it is filling up despite our poor form of late. Please contact me if you want to book on 07771-792346.

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