‘Is there still a glass ceiling? Of course’: Kazim-Richards fights for breakthrough at Crawley

Colin Kazim-Richards accepts the scale of the task of improving the situation at Crawley who sit bottom of League Two after seven games. But on the evidence of what he has seen, the head coach is sure better times lie ahead.

On a late summer’s afternoon at Crawley’s training ground in Sussex, Kazim-Richards, alongside his assistant, Julian Gray, the pair arriving in March and managing to save the club from relegation to the National League on the final day, speaks of the challenges ahead and how the team’s league position tells only part of the story.

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“The results are not showing the work we’ve done; it’s more a case of when the process is going to start showing,” Kazim-Richards says. “We’ve got 16 new players, eight, nine debuts and different connections. So loads of ins, loads of outs and trying to get over the mentality of last season. It’s not a task that is just a week, two weeks or a three-week process.

“As players you don’t really understand what it entails as a manager. You’re trying to churn out results within trying to do the process you want. The recruitment, gelling people character-wise, mentality-wise, implementing a new structure, implementing a new standard within the club, and not just the football side. But it ultimately falls down on the results. We know that and it’s something we’re working to change.”

Kazim-Richards and Gray came through the Arsenal academy, albeit at different times. Gray was part of the first-team squad from 1996 to 2000, making a single appearance. Seven years his junior, Kazim-Richards never made it to the first team, but kept an eye on Gray. “He’s someone we would look at and be like: ‘I want to be like Julian,’” Kazim-Richards says. “He was from where we’re from and was in an Arsenal first team. But the way he was playing, that aura, that silkiness, but also that fight.”

Gray, whose clubs include Crystal Palace, Coventry and Fulham, has coached youth-level groups at Arsenal’s Hale End academy, as well as at Birmingham, another of his former clubs. He explains how that experience is serving him at Crawley. “You learn different things and you also want to challenge yourself,” says the 47-year-old.

“I always believe that I’m coaching to help the players be better and pass on my knowledge and experience. It’s the same whatever age group. It’s my job to improve the players. Whether it’s 1% or 10%, that depends on them. First and foremost, I have to understand them, that’s always been a big thing for me. I need to know what they need and for the best way to give them that information.”

Crawley has been a place of turmoil in recent times, with John Yems, who managed the club between 2019 and 2022, receiving a three-year ban from all football-related activity by the Football Association after being found guilty of 12 breaches of anti-discrimination rules, the longest ban issued to a participant in English football for discrimination. Last year, there was a change of ownership at Broadfield Stadium, with KB Sports and Leisure, headed by Raphael Khalili, taking charge. Khalili hired Kazim-Richards, who was coaching at Arsenal’s academy at the time. In the process he became the third black head coach in the top four tiers of English football, the other two being Nuno Espírito Santo at West Ham and Lee Grant at Walsall.