Crawley Town v Bristol Rovers: Kazim-Richards’ clear message to players after win at Rochdale
Crawley Town Manager Colin Kazim-Richards wants his players to enjoy the wins and let him worry about the next game.
Speaking ahead of Saturday’s home game against Bristol Rovers, he reflected on their first League Two win of the season, which came with a 2-1 success at Rochdale last Saturday.
He said: “Enjoy it. I think people don’t enjoy the moment. That’s my job to straight away think about the next game. As players, enjoy it right now. Enjoy it, because you can go through difficult moments, as the club went through difficult moments last year.
“Enjoy it. But I’d like to say they have a good coaching staff in terms of still what needs to be done on the pitch, what needs to be identified. I’m not here saying ‘go and have a party’. At the same time, there were a lot of things to identify what we can get better on.
“But enjoy it. You just got three points. The way we’ve done it in terms of the character, in terms of going through adversity the week before and changing, four or five players and the players that come on. Enjoy it, but understand when we come back on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, there’s work to do and we’ve got another game.
“The men are ready. We’re prepped, we’re still prepping, but in terms of energy, it’s top right now. I have to be honest, even when we did have the little blip first game of the season, it was an easy identification of what happened. So, the energy was still there or thereabouts. Obviously after you get the three points on the board, it’s even better.”
Kazim-Richards is positive that his side can capitalise on Bristol Rovers’ defensive fragility. So far this season, the Pirates have conceded seven goals in the two games.
He said: “I think if you look at the team that we’re playing, this is not a criticism. We have to identify areas where we feel that we can punish. They’ve conceded quite a few goals in two games.
"So, we have to be on top of our game to be able to punish the mistakes that they might give us. We’ll be prepared for that, and I can honestly say I’m very positive that we’ll capitalise on that.”
Despite only having been with the team a couple of days before playing at Rochdale, Kazim-Richards felt he had full confidence in Kai Jennings to start him straight away, and the new recruit rewarded that trust with a fine performance.
The manager said “You always identify things like that. When it comes off, it’s a bonus, and that’s why he was able to start the game because we had full trust, full confidence in him.
“He’s someone that we’ve identified for a long time. And in football, 24 hours is a very long time. Things change. It changed. He was able to come in and seeing him in training close up, in the flesh, and identifying again what Rochdale gave us.
"It was just a situation where we felt the game suited him a lot. I thought his chance came too early in the game. I think if that comes like four or five minutes later, he probably puts it away or someone else scores. It’s onwards and upwards for him and the team as a collective.”