Exciting or worrying times at Crawley Town? We will see in time - opinion

Patience, I am sure, will see the strengthening of our team in order that we can put behind us the anxious finale to last season.

There is arguably, already, the basis of a good League 2 side at Crawley Town with eighteen players available for kit sponsorship, according to the Crawley Town website on June 9 2023.

However, when that eighteen includes Kwesi Appiah and Jake Hessenthaler, who for some reason last year were out of favour at the club, you could consider the number to be slightly smaller.

I have always appreciated the effort put in by both but, without knowing the reasons why they went off the radar last year, their future with the Red Devils is up for debate.

That debate is something that needs to be cleared up soon as possible and these are the questions that need answering by the club and its owners so that we can move forward and start to rebuild links between the two parties that are the furthest apart at the moment, the owners and a sizeable number of the fans.

The referendum issued by the CTSA last week, which I couldn’t vote in it because it did not offer an alternative option, has shown that a small, but significant, number of CTSA members want change in the ownership, but not necessarily change of the owners.

In my opinion this vote would have had more validity if the alternative option, of allowing Wagmi to prove they have learnt from mistakes made last year, had been made available.

I am not saying I would have voted for that option, but having it on the ballot paper would have given any result more credibility.

Back to the subject that matters most, if the squad slims down by two or three players, see above the comments re Kwesi and Jake, and Aramide does not extend his contract, then we would be down to fifteen players, meaning, in my opinion, that we would need at least another seven players to make us viable to continue our Football League experience into a fourteenth season.

Once again in my opinion, those seven players must include another keeper, at least to challenge Corey, and two quality players in defence, midfield and up front.

Fixtures out this Thursday, season ticket bought last week and six pre-season friendlies arranged between the 11th and 29th July will make the time fly between now and the beginning of the season on 5th August.

Exciting or Worrying times? We will see in time.

But here are a few tips for both the owners and the CTSA. Talk to one another with a sense of cooperation, drop negative words like “demand” from your rhetoric and stop trying to see things which may not be there.