Crawley Town's diamonds are still showing their rough edges - opinion

But, without the cutting and polishing, the raw diamonds fail to surge a spark in price and remain cheaper than the brilliant-cut polished gems.

But diamonds are not polished in the rough; they are polished after cleaving and cutting. Trying to polish a rough diamond into anything looking like a gem would be an incredibly tedious and time-consuming process.

And that is what Scott Lindsey, Jamie Day and Carl Laraman are attempting to do with our, I was going to say half cut, squad. But that might be misconstrued.

Suffice it to say, I compare our team to a bag full of rough uncut diamonds, that are beginning to shine thanks to the hard work put in by our management and coaching team, but as yet are in need of some more work.

On Saturday, as I am typing this, I note that we face two ex-Red Devils in Dom Telford, who starts, and Jamie Proctor on the bench. I know both will have been treated with respect by the travelling Red Devil supporters for their efforts while with us, but now is the time to see what Gary Smith and Travel Ken think. I’ll be back..........

Soon as “iFollow” creaks into activity, we learn that the team on the pitch is unchanged but the team on the mic is down to Gary Smith without his partner, Travel Ken, and that left me with a sense of foreboding, which unfortunately proved to be correct.

Predictably, Telford hit the winner for Barrow whilst we were still waking up at the beginning of the second half, and try as we might, we couldn’t equalise and probably wouldn’t have if the game had gone on for longer than the seven added on minutes. There was some discussion that Will Wright was fouled in the build up to the goal, but for me the incident appeared to be off camera, or I had glanced away for a moment

The diamonds are still showing their rough edges and in need of a bit more polishing and now I will have to revise my target as published in last week’s Observer, but not down, as that would be pessimistic.

We now need to win at home against Harrogate and follow that up with a win at Meadow Lane against Notts County, if we are to put in a realistic charge for a league position that would warrant further investment in the upcoming January transfer window.

If you, as a team have twice as much possession as your opposition and almost the same stats as far as shots and shots on target are concerned, then surely the result should tend to go your way in the end, but as several fans and Gary Smith observed ‘If you don’t buy a ticket, you can’t win the raffle’.

In the end the game could have gone either way, and when Barrow attempted to clean up by bringing on Proctor and Campbell (sounds like Gamble) you just knew the 65 fantastic Red Devil supporters would have to travel home, 300 odd miles, disappointed

Next up, Harrogate at home. COYR