Mark Yates wants to make the Checkatrade.com Crawley’s fortress

He is keen to make a good start in Saturday’s first home game of the season against AFC Wimbledon but is aware of the threat the visitors will offer.

Yates said: “Akinfenwa, Elliott, Lyle Taylor up top - you are not going to get three more powerful units and we’ve got to deal with it.

“We see what they do to us on Saturday and try and exploit any weaknesses we might have seen.

“We need to impose our system on them and make us dominate the game.”

Yates hopes to make a happy introduction to his newly-assembled squad to the home fans.

He said: “We are looking forward to it. I thought we had really good support for both games, particularly the Oxford one in terms of numbers.

“People have seen in pre-season we have got an honest group.

“We haven’t got the biggest group. We haven’t got the best group, but we’ve got a group who want to put that shirt on and want do well for themselves, for the club and for the team. As long as the supporters see that they’ll be pleased with what they’re given.

“We want to win every game, unfortunately we haven’t won yet, particularly at home we want to make this place a hard place to come where somewhere other clubs don’t particularly enjoy coming to.

“We’ve got to make things happen and that sometimes means being better defensively. We don’t want to be giving goal starts to teams, particularly when you are playing someone from a higher division or who are very good in yours.

“We wanted to make a solid start and are looking at taking points from all our first five games and then assessing where we are after.

“We don’t fear anybody. When Portsmouth and AFC Wimbledon bring their best teams on Tuesday and Saturday, we know they are tough and just try to be as consistent and reliable as we can and try to score goals to go with that.

Connor Henderson is expected to be fit again after a knock to the ankle suffered against Oxford ruled him out of the Peterborough Capital One Cup exit.

Don’t miss out on all the latest breaking news where you live.

Here are four ways you can be sure you’ll be amongst the first to know what’s going on.

1 Make this website your homepage

2 Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/pages/Sport-Sussex

3 Follow us on Twitter @SportSussex

4 Register with us by clicking on ‘sign in’ (top right corner). You can then receive our daily newsletter AND add your point of view to stories that you read here.

And do share with your family and friends - so they don’t miss out!