00:00According to our stats, Saturday's game against Crewe was your 100th game in charge of calling
00:04the fixtures.
00:06Yeah, so obviously, firstly, how do you reflect on those 100 games?
00:10Yeah, obviously I love it here, you know, I've had some brilliant times, like obviously
00:15the Wembley situation was great, MK Dons away from home, you know, with the 8-1 aggregate
00:23scoreline for the semi-finals was great, you know.
00:26So, even Hartley pull away in my first season when we had to win and we kept them up that
00:32day, it was a fantastic day as well, albeit probably the wrong end of the table, but it
00:38was still a big day for the club.
00:42And yeah, I've really enjoyed my time here and, you know, over two spells now.
00:49We just want to try and build something now, it's just the start of a journey, obviously
00:55new ownership, which is going to be good for the football club.
01:00And we've got to try and build something on the pitch as well, which again, it's the start
01:07of a journey.
01:08We're very infant with that at the moment, you know, we're early stages of what we want
01:14to do and how we want to do it.
01:16We don't want to lose wholesale players every window, which we have done in the past.
01:21We want to try and settle that down a little bit and have a little bit more continuity within
01:25the club.
01:27And I think, to add to that as well, over the 100 games I've had, it's actually, you know,
01:32been difficult times as well.
01:33You know, there's been some real difficult times with kind of losing players as well.
01:37And, you know, like I say, when we played at Wembley, I think the season following, we
01:43had probably three players left from that Wembley team, you know, and that's tough to
01:46take for a manager and to continue, you know, coaching a new set of team or a new set of
01:52lads is sometimes hard, you know, and we want to try and get to a position where we haven't
01:58got to do that every season or every window.
02:00Certainly we want to add to the squad and not just keep, you know, chopping it up every window.
02:05And that's kind of like the experiences I've had over the 100 games.
02:11But like I say, I've really enjoyed it.
02:12I absolutely love, you know, this football club.
02:16I feel it's my club.
02:17I feel that the relationship I've got with the fans, any second to none, you know, I
02:23think they're class.
02:24You know, even on Saturday we lose the game.
02:27I think we showed a fighting spirit in the game, which is why they applauded us at the
02:30end.
02:30It's quite emotional actually because we're desperate for the lads to do well and I'm desperate
02:34for the fans to see us win a game and score some goals to make them happy, you know.
02:38I'm actually sad about the fact that we're not yet.
02:41We haven't kick-started our season yet and I really want that to happen.
02:46Sticking with 100 games, was there a point early on in your management at Crawley that
02:51you realised this was a really special club and what makes it such a special club?
02:55Yeah, I think probably the Artie Paul game actually maybe was the point where I did think that
02:59because, you know, the crowd, you know, the fans travelled a long way, right, the other
03:06side of the country and I remember kind of celebrating at the end of the game and going
03:11into the dressing room and thinking, yeah, this feels proper, like, you know, and then
03:16kind of settling down the next season and I really like the fact that we were backed to
03:21to be relegation favourites, I liked that, it helped us and the fact that we built a narrative
03:28in the dressing room that, you know, we used it and we liked the fact that we were underdogs
03:33and I think that's helped.
03:34I quite like being an underdog, sorry, anyway, you know, I think it helps kind of me create
03:41an environment almost like us against the world type of environment and I like that about
03:46the club, I think that we're always going to have that, we're quite a small club in many
03:50ways and I think it helps us, I think it's helped, certainly my success since I've been
03:57here.
03:59And where do you see the club in 100 games time?
04:03Well, listen, you know, talking to Raf and where we want to go is, you know, we want to
04:10go through the leagues, you know, we want to go through the leagues, that's going to happen
04:15eventually, I think, but it might take a bit of time. We've got, like I say, build a continuity
04:22with the playing staff and to try and not have wholesale changes every window where we
04:31can add one or two and try and build a continuity. I think when you look at lead two, certainly
04:37last season, all the top seven who finished in the top seven, their managers had been
04:43in post pretty much two or three years, apart from probably Stuart Maynard, who had been
04:47in post about 13 months maybe, everybody else, you know, Graham Alexander, you know, Jacko
04:52at Wimbledon, Matt Sadler at Walsop, they've been there two or three years, so you look at
04:59that, that's continuity, that's kind of having a manager in post, you know, for a long period
05:04of time that they can get a way of working within the football club, a way of playing
05:11on the pitch and I think that we need to have that, you know, we need to have a bit of stability,
05:16not just with the management team but also with the players as well.
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