New Manager Bounce Arrives Fashionably Late for Crawley

If you were planning to leave Broadfield Stadium early on Saturday afternoon, you'd have been kicking yourself all the way to the car park. What looked destined to be another dreary afternoon of League Two mediocrity exploded into life in the most dramatic fashion possible, as Crawley Town finally remembered how to win a football match.

For 90 minutes, it seemed like the same old story for the Red Devils. Eleven matches without a victory tends to weigh heavily on a team's shoulders, and despite the arrival of new gaffer Colin Kazim-Richards, the deadlock with Gillingham suggested the curse might take more than a fresh face to lift.

How wrong we were. Football, as we're constantly reminded, is a game of fine margins - and sometimes those margins arrive in bunches during stoppage time.

Taylor Richards chose the perfect moment to open his account, finding the net in the first minute of added time to send the Broadfield Stadium faithful into delirium. After nearly three months of watching their team forget where the goal was, you could forgive them for thinking it was a mirage.

But this was no false dawn. Two minutes later, Tobi Adeyemo marked his first start for the club in the most memorable way possible, doubling the lead and ensuring Kazim-Richards would enjoy his post-match interview considerably more than his opposite number.

For Crawley, this wasn't just three points - it was a potential lifeline in what's shaping up to be a grueling relegation battle. Eleven matches without a win in League Two is the kind of run that sends teams tumbling through the divisions, but sometimes all it takes is one moment of magic to change the narrative.

Gillingham, meanwhile, will be wondering what they've done to anger the football gods. Five successive defeats is painful enough without having victory snatched away in the cruellest fashion possible. They'll have felt they'd done enough to earn at least a point from their trip to West Sussex, only to discover that sometimes doing enough simply isn't enough.

Kazim-Richards couldn't have asked for a better start to life in the Crawley hot seat. New manager bounces are supposed to be immediate affairs, but his team clearly preferred the theatrical approach - keeping everyone guessing until the very last moment before delivering the goods when it mattered most.

Whether this proves to be the turning point in Crawley's season or merely a brief respite from their struggles remains to be seen. But for now, they can enjoy the unfamiliar feeling of celebrating three points and remember why they fell in love with this beautiful, maddening game in the first place.