Successful underdogs are usually regarded as lovable, heroic and inspiring. Crawley Town are none of these things.
The curse of facing Crawley keeps striking down Championship clubs – Derby County before facing Manchester United last season and Bristol City and now Hull City this year. They should be the nation’s darlings but what should be a heart-warming story in the best FA Cup tradition has become a tale in which the protagonists remain difficult to love.
The central character is their brash and burly manager, Steve Evans, and alongside him in the dugout is his assistant Paul Raynor, similarly chippy and churlish.
Referee Stuart Attwell eventually found Raynor intolerable on the sidelines, sending him to the stands following dissent. Nicky Barmby, Hull’s normally level-headed and mild-mannered manager, was also unhappy as he felt the opposition coaching staff were looking to “get players sent off”.
At one stage, Barmby had to be held back as he pointed a finger and shouted at the Crawley bench. In most of his talks with the media, Barmby was gracious and complimentary about Crawley’s richly deserved victory but when asked about the problems on the touchline, Bramby said exactly what had upset him.
When asked to respond, Evans seized on the chance for confrontation, saying that he was “grabbing at straws and needs to concentrate on what is going on, on the pitch”.
When one journalist pointed out that Barmby “didn’t want to detract from what you have done”, Evans did not want to patch things up. “He shouldn’t have said it then,” he responded spicily before proceeding on a rant.
Even a good-natured question about whether the Cup brings the best out of Crawley was met by a terse answer. “I don’t know if it brings the best out of us when we play Cup games because we broke every record in non-League football,” said Evans cuttingly.
On the way to breaking those records, they were also unpopular with opponents. They were viewed as nouveau riche braggarts, having spent heavily before achieving their success. Despite that investment, the club’s owners are still not earning much warmth from Evans.
“If they sell a player or two, I’ll be devastated,” he said. “I’ll be on the floor. But I have to trust them to make the right decision for the football club, hard as it is to accept.
“That’s a decision we have to leave to the owners. They don’t really discuss those decisions other than to tell me what they are, and they tell me in confidence to respect that and that’s what I have to do.
“Our football club under the directors – the Carter family, Ian and Susan – is run with a fine toothcomb. They’ve not been frightened to tell me in this transfer window that players we’ve had bids turned down for, we can’t go back for because we have gone to our maximum.”
One man that Crawley would clearly suffer from selling is their match-winner Matt Tubbs, who scored his 18th goal of the season with a cool finish to reward his side’s dominance.
“We are a confident bunch of lads,” said Tubbs. “You saw that at Manchester United last year. Who knows where we can go?”
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