Crawley Town Faces FA Cup Humiliation Against Wimborne Town
Crawley Town’s season plunged to a new low with an FA Cup humiliation at Wimborne Town – and interim boss Kevin Blackwell did not bother reaching for the usual excuses.
The League Two strugglers, already bottom of the Football League, were beaten 2-0 by seventh-tier part-timers, a 57-place gulf in the pyramid turned completely on its head. For Blackwell, it was not a freak cup upset. It was a brutal exposé.
“The recruitment of this football club over the last 12 months has left it in a bad position,” he told BBC Radio Sussex, his words cutting through the shock of the result. “We have neither [enough] technical or physical players. We've got some, not enough. And I am quite open about this.”
This was not a manager protecting his dressing room. It was a diagnosis.
A club stripped bare
Blackwell was brought in to steady a listing ship after Colin Kazim-Richards was sacked, but he made it clear the problems did not start in the dugout. They were built over windows, not weeks.
Wimborne’s win, secured against full-time professionals supposedly operating four divisions higher, underlined his point. Crawley were out-thought, out-fought and, in Blackwell’s view, badly short of the basic tools needed to compete.
“The options for the coach, whether it was the guy before me or whoever, is limited off the bench,” he said. The substitutes’ bench, meant to change games, instead laid bare the thinness of the squad.
He insisted the club should not be in this position. Not with its budget. “The club pays decent wages - it should be higher up the league. I've been impressed with what I've seen around the club but some of the technical side of the football, I'm really shocked with.”
Shock is a strong word from a man who has seen most things in the game, from promotion pushes with Sheffield United to survival fights elsewhere. Yet here he was, stunned by the basics.
A job others walked away from
Blackwell also lifted the lid on just how damaged the Crawley project has looked from the outside.
He revealed another manager had already agreed to take the job, only to walk away after a defeat by Shrewsbury last month while Kazim-Richards was still in charge. One bad result, and the supposed new man backed out.
“I've come in to try and pick the club up and get some results, to maybe allow the club to look much more of an attractive proposition,” Blackwell said. “The reason I came is that someone had already agreed to take the club, and then they lost to Shrewsbury and he decided he wouldn't come.”
It is an extraordinary admission. A Football League club, with “decent wages” on offer, left scrambling after a manager changed his mind on the back of one performance.
So Blackwell has stepped into a job another man did not want, with a squad he believes is neither strong enough nor skilful enough, and a league position that reflects it.
The FA Cup defeat at Wimborne did more than end a cup run. It stripped away any illusions about where Crawley Town really stand – and how far they now have to climb just to look like an attractive proposition again.
