Crawley Town's new assistant manager reveals what Scott Lindsey was like as a player

The former Reading and Fulham midfielder left the manager’s job at Cray Wanderers and jumped straight into action at training last Friday as they prepared for the Bristol Rovers game.

The 53-year-old played with Lindsey at Gillingham in the early 90s and jumped at the chance to link up with his former colleague.

But did he always know his former teammate would become a successful coach and manager? And what was Lindsey like as a player?

"Scott was a very committed player, like we all were in those days in the 90s, you had to be. I'll never forget the quote ‘get your retaliation in first’, but he was one of them.

“He was fully committed as a player and worked his socks off to try and get to where he wanted to get to. Did I see him being a coach? Obviously we go our separate ways, I've been on the coaching course with him, we did our A licence together and what I saw was someone who was such an aggressive player, winning tackles and being in your face, to someone who plays in the way he's playing, which is beautiful football.

“So no, probably not. But he doesn't want to just play that way for the sake of playing that way, he wants to play that way to go and win the game. It's not about looking pretty, it's about doing it for a reason and the reason is we want to win, but if we can do it that way, alls the better. It's brilliant, I'm watching him coaching and it's phenomenal how precise he is with everything he does. Nothing's taken by chance.”

And Smith now can’t wait to learn from Lindsey and achieve things with this squad. He said: “We're going to work on everything we've got, give all the players the instructions they need, but simplify them, make them nice and simple, but this is, as a group, this is how we're going to do it and I've got to buy into that as well because it is new to me.

“I'm learning with him on the job because, like I say, with the amount of games we've got we've got to make sure that we win as many as we can.”

But where do Smith’s ambitions lie? Does he want to manage at this level? “I just want to learn, if I can learn from Scott, it's an amazing situation to be in,” he said. “I'm not looking any further than the end of this season.

“When I speak to Scott and the good times he had here and how we did it, it was an impossible task then and this one's just as impossible. I think it's one of them where if we were to manage to do it or take it as far as we can then I think it's just a bigger achievement to stay in this division with the situation we've walked into.”