Lindsey excited as Crawley Town begin new era with Grimsby Town test

The Reds lost their last pre-season game 3-0 to FA Cup winners Crystal Palace, but now it’s time for the real test to start.

The added excitement for Crawley fans is that the season starts a day after new owners were announced at the club.

Talking to club media, Lindsey said “Grimsby Town is a great football club, well supported, brilliant manager, good squad, recruited really well. I’ve been impressed with them with the bits that I’ve watched. It is a tough place to go, and it is a very tough game, but we’re going to embrace that.

“We want to challenge ourselves against good sides, and we can only improve by playing in these games. We’re really looking forward to it, but we know how hard it’s going to be.

"We know how good they are if they get control of the game, they can really control it so we’ve got to make sure that we have our way of combating against that, and hopefully we can stamp our authority on the game ourselves.”

Despite not playing a game in the past week, Lindsey says the team are ready to go.

“We wanted a clear week going into this first game. You want to build into that first game like a normal week would look like. It’s the first time in 6 weeks that we’ve actually brought the running distances down.

“I’ve sat down with Rick, the Strength and Conditioning coach, and gone through that in real fine detail how each week looks, and this week was always going to be a normal week.

"I think it’s probably helped actually we played Friday night as that gave us that extra day of recovery. We’re really ready, prepared and looking forward to it.”

Get news from Grimsby v Crawley on this website later.