Crawley Town: The Unpopular Underdogs
Football Pubcast blogger Tom Clee takes a look at the non-league side whose FA Cup progression flies in the face of football romanticism in the eyes of many football fans.
In a financially precarious age where league performance can shape a club’s foreseeable future, there has been widespread fear that the oldest cup competition in the world could be destined for a future as a mere footnote on the footballing calendar.
And so, just as all hope seemed to be lost amid a sea of bigger fish to fry, this fifth round draw could not have come at a better time. Manchester United versus Crawley Town. The first non-league team to reach the last sixteen in seventeen years handed the perfect draw away in the Theatre of Dreams. Who said the romance of the FA Cup was dead?
However, once you remove the rose-tinted spectacles a slightly more sobering reality becomes apparent. You see, in this latest story of David and Goliath, the minnows are equipped with significant financial muscle and are certainly not fighting on behalf of the little guy.
Of course, it’ll never be like it used to. In recent years many non-league sides have recognised the vast rewards of investing a little money in order to break the glass ceiling of the Conference. And if you’ve got the resources then there’s plenty of potential for radical improvement, with English talent being forced further and further down the league pyramid thanks to the ever-increasing influx of foreign players. The days of plumbers and postmen pulling on their boots at the weekend have long since passed.
However, when Bruce Winfield, local fan and head of the consortium that rescued the club in 2009, announced last July that there was ‘money in the bank’ now that all debts had been paid off, few were braced for the spending spree that followed.
Crawley forked out more over the summer than all of the current League Two clubs combined. Goalkeeper Michael Kuipers was lured from Brighton & Hove Albion, while former Rotherham captain Pablo Mills was recruited to marshal the midfield. Matt Tubbs and Richard Brodie, the two top scorers in the Conference last season with over 60 goals between them, were signed from Salisbury and York respectively for undisclosed fees believed to total nearly £300k. Perhaps their biggest coup however came with the signature of Argentinian Sergio Torres, who just last year was plying his trade in the Championship for Peterborough.
There remains an air of mystery around the ‘friends and business acquaintances’ of Winfield who have helped fund this lavish project, little is known except that the two main shareholders are a restaurateur and a banker based in Hong Kong. In Crawley’s defence, all fees have been paid on time and the board insists that they are sticking to a strict, if slightly inflated, wage budget. Everything seems to have been completely above board.
Their huge outlay certainly seems to paying off with Crawley sitting pretty in second, two points behind AFC Wimbledon at the top of the Conference table with four games in hand. It’s all a far cry from their flirtation with extinction in recent years; in 2006 they came within an hour of being liquidised due to unpaid debts, while just last year they faced a winding-up order in London’s High Court.
However, outside of the Broadfield Stadium there has been a noticeable lack of support for the team considered to be the bullyboys of the Conference, having put plenty of noses out of joint with their twisting of arms in the transfer market. Think a non-league version of Manchester City, just without the charming Italian at the helm.
Steve Evans, manager of Crawley since 2007 when he was appointed by disgraced former-chairman Chas Majeed, is a fiery Glaswegian to make his soon-to-be-counterpart Sir Alex Ferguson appear little more than a shrinking violet. Evans has been sent from the dugout more times than he would care to remember, while only his cheque book could attest to the number of times he has been fined for improper conduct. In February 2006 he had to be escorted from Grimsby’s Blundell Park and dealt with by a police officer after a complaint of foul and abusive language while eight months later he was involved in a touchline altercation with Wycombe player Tommy Doherty. Repeated misbehaviour meant a 10 game suspended sentence materialised into 13-game touchline ban in 2008.
However, much of the disdain for this controversial figure runs much deeper than that. Many felt that he should have been banned from the game in 2003 when he was found guilty of doctoring contracts and running a wages and bonus scam that aided Boston’s success under his stewardship. Instead he was slapped on the wrist with a twenty month ban and an additional £8,000 fine for impeding the FA inquiry. He soon returned to help Boston reach the Football League but in 2006 was convicted of conspiracy to cheat the public revenue.
Again Boston stuck by their man, but after The Pilgrims were relegated back to the Conference in 2007, Evans and his assistant Paul Raynor resigned to take up their current positions at Crawley, just days after pledging their commitment to Boston. Many feel that the blame for the ensuing demise of his former club lies firmly at Evans’ door.
So, having defeated League Two Torquay on Saturday, as well as League One Swindon and Championship outfit Derby County previously, can they add the biggest of all Premiership scalps to their impressive collection?
Who knows? Certainly, many will be rallying behind the undoubted underdogs. However, don’t be fooled into thinking there is just one set of Red Devils with financial clout and a belligerent boss taking to the field at Old Trafford on the 19th of February. The romanticism of the FA Cup may not be dead and buried, but as with everything in this cut-and-dried and corporate age, it seems that it needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.