‘They need some help’ – Crawley Town boss on need to improve the standard of refereeing

Saturday was a tough day at the office for Kazim-Richards and his team as they lost 2-0 at home to Bristol Rovers.

Their frustration was added to by injustices felt by the Crawley camp during the match – and afterwards Kazim-Richards was asked what needed to be changed to improve the standard of refereeing in the EFL.

He said, “I am really not sure because it’s like you stand there and you talk to the fourth official and he is like “No, I agree with you”, and that doesn’t help me.

"It does’t help a coach to hear “I agree with you, I don’t know why he’s not given it” or it is a foul, what do you do? Higher up obviously they have VAR and things will get pulled back and they get help.

“And then if you look down at the lower leagues. I’m not asking for VAR because I understand financially a lot of teams can’t afford it and they don’t have the infrastructure.

"But what I will say is when you come to the lower leagues, especially League Two, it’s probably the league with the most contact, actually statistically it is the most physical league in terms of duels, long throws and free kicks coming into your area. They need some help.”

Kazim-Richards admitted he did not have all the answers but that he felt like his energy was wasted during games.

“I’m not going to sit here and say to you that I know the help that they need because I don’t, but I just feel like sometimes the conversations are just air. We’re just all wasting air – and especially when there’s blatant ones,” he added.

On a tactical note Crawley went with two ‘out and out’ strikers in the second half against Rovers – as they tried to recover from 2-0 down – with Pemi Aderoju and Danilo Orsi.

When asked about that dynamic, Kazim-Richards said, “It is something that is an option. I think for all our strikers they all can benefit from playing with someone else to occupy defenders.

"It’s just that we have to be better in recognising now that we have two strikers and things need to come into their feet earlier.

“We start playing around the areas. We have to move the ball quicker because it won’t mean anything if we have two strikers on and teams can get back into a low block, it’ll just be the same situation but just an extra man on the top line.”

Before Saturday’s loss, Crawley had been very effective at creating chances – however that was lacking against Rovers and the manager said that was down to taking “too long to break the lines.

"When we did break the line, we then took long again and allowed them to get back in, so a little bit more urgency, a little bit more speed of thought, speed of thought for me is everything. I thought that we didn’t make decisions quick enough and when we did get into the areas the quality wasn’t good enough.”

Crawley are at Northampton on Tuesday night and go to Accrington on Saturday.