'I'm angry' - Crawley Town boss criticises players after horror show at Huddersfield Town

A shocking first 28 minutes saw Crawley 4-0 down before Huddersfield took their foot off the gas. They scored a fifth in the second half before Ade Adeyemo scored a brilliant consolation.

But is was arguably Reds’ worst performance of the season and Elliot said he was ‘disappointed’ and ‘angry’ with the players.

"To be honest with you, I've took a lot of stick from it, but I always try and protect the players, even though it's not always my complete thoughts,” said Elliot. “But it just wasn't good enough and it hasn't been at times.

“It's taught me why we are where we are and from myself as well. I've got to take a huge amount of the blame for it as well.

“But, yes, we just have to be able to deal with the situation, deal with moments better and we haven't done that all season. And it's been a consistency of no matter who's played, we still end up in the same scenario.

“So it's a tough, tough ask for us to be in this league and to be able to compete. But if we don't even give ourselves the opportunity to compete, then what's the point?

“Being brutally honest, coming here, a fantastic stadium, a massive club should be something I'd be embracing as a player to go and play and give my all on a big stage. And we just didn't do it and we allowed the game to pass us by. I said to the lads in there, still fantastic human beings, still really good lads.

“A lot of them are young and inexperienced and that doesn't help. But, you know, we should have learned enough lessons from this season to be able to manage the games and manage the moments and get ourselves back on track or get ourselves off to a good start to keep us on track.

“But, yes, the disappointing thing was that you can accept that maybe you go one-nil down early on, but to go two, three and four and not try and fix it was frustrating. So, yes, I'm disappointed with the lads today. I really am.

“And I'm angry with them as well because it's a great opportunity for us to come and put in a performance in an occasion for the fans and obviously I apologise to them.

“Travelling all that way for that performance is not acceptable, so I can only apologise. And, yes, it's just really disappointing. There's not much else to say on it.”

But Elliot said they are a really good group of lads and had a good training session the day before and can’t understand why the performance was what it was.

"I think the squad's a good group of lads. Like you said, they're a really good group of lads,” he said. “They work hard for the team. We talked about our running levels need to be better and higher to compete at this level because physically we are below this level. That's just a fact. We are every week. We are. But we can't control the fact that we can't make us physically better in terms of our output. All we can do is maximise what we've got.

“And you know what? I don't mind when we fall short at times because teams just physically and obviously resources and players, they might just have the edge on us, but not like that because we've given the game up and we haven't even tried to stick into it to give ourselves that bite.

“We talked about the last couple of games about getting through the first 15 minutes when it is a bit more war. It's a bit hectic and your teams are turning you and we just didn't do that at all today. We didn't manage it and that's why we end up the situation we are in.

“It becomes a long, horrible day where you can't enjoy what should be something that the club should be coming and relishing.”