'There's a lot to work to do, but there's a lot of positives' - Colin Kazim-Richards assesses Crawley Town's start to the season
We are only five games into the League Two season, but Crawley Town are in familiar territory.
With one win, one draw and three defeats, Reds find themselves 21st in the table, a position they did not want to be in when the season started.
But as Colin Kazim-Richards points out, there are a lot of positives to take from the opening games of the season despite the results.
The Reds boss knows there is a long way to go and he is working with a young squad and he feels they will be climbing that table.
Ahead of the Cheltenham game, BBC Sussex’s Robin Grey asked Kazim -Richards how he assessed the season so far.
He said: “How do I assess it? I put it down like this. The way we want to play, you can see in certain aspects of the game where we're dominant and you can see where we need to be better in terms of capitalising on our dominance, in terms of goal returns.
"If you look at it just from a points aspect, it's not where any of us would have wanted to be, but at the same time, I feel we've got 16 new players, eight debuts, for example, and it's a brand new team coming out of a season that wasn't really great.
“But at the same time, there's a lot of positives to take from it, in terms of the way we want to play, in terms of being dominant in our 1v1s, in terms of our final third entries and our creation. But we have to capitalise. We have to, as I said in the last one, I think it was Rochdale away, we have to eat our food, which means basically finish the action in terms of a goal from our creations.
“So if I sum it all up, there's a lot to work on, but also there's a lot of positives. And now we need to start turning those positives into points.”
And the former Brighton striker was adamant they won’t find themselves in the same position as they did last season, where they survived on the final day. He also made a comparison with the promotion-winning season, where, on matchday five, the Reds lost 6-0 away at Swindon Town.
"They were at the wrong end of the table and they ended up finishing the playoffs, even in February. You don't compare to the worst. I'm not going to compare to last season,” he said.
“That's not going to happen. I promise you that's not going to happen. We're five games in.”
He added: “We've had chances again. We still could have come away with something and that was our worst that we've been in the five league games. So again, I can say to you that won't happen again. We won't start off two halves slow like we did. And you can look forward to Saturday's game for sure."
You can listen to Robin Grey’s full interview with Colin Kazim-Richards at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0p8x34x.