Spotlight on: Scott Lindsey, Crawley Town

Lindsey on what he learnt as an academy coach

You pick up from all your experiences. I’ve got a young player in at the moment, literally just fresh out the academy, and I know how to speak to him. I can see him beating himself up when things don’t go quite right. So I pull him to one side, put my arm around him, and tell him to be less hard on himself, and to be confident and enjoy the moments when you do well. It’s just little things like that that I remember from when I worked in an academy.  It’s care and trust you want to build with them, for them to feel they’re in a safe learning environment. I’m big on the players being happy in my environment, even if they’re not playing. You know what football is like. They want to play. Not all of them can. So we have to build a real happy environment in which the players feel safe, they feel wanted, and they feel as if they can learn. 

Lindsey on creating stability at Crawley 

The secret is just really, really long hours and hard work and also being ruthless as a manager, because the environment when I went in wasn’t right, and I had to get the environment right, I had to get the culture right. In order to get the culture right, you may have to change personnel. It’s harder to do that with players because they’re obviously under contract, but over time we did. I put really strict rules in place when I first came into the club. I knew a lot of the players would fall by the wayside, and they couldn’t keep up with these rules. If you’re going to play for me, you had to run. If you didn’t run, then you sat down with me on the bench and you didn’t play. People started to think really quickly, ‘Wow, this guy means business.’

The biggest task to start with was to keep them up. They were third from bottom when I went in. So I had to be smart about that. I knew how I wanted to play, but I didn’t think that this group of players could do that, so I had to water down what my beliefs were in order for me to get the job done. We managed to stay up by three points, and then it was time to go to work. Everyone thought, ‘Oh, you’re a hero, you’ve kept us up,’ and in my mind, I’m thinking, ‘I haven’t even started yet.’ 

The recruitment was really good that summer, we found potential from lower leagues. I didn’t care where we were signing these players from, I just wanted fresh faces in, because I knew I was going to coach the life out of them, and I did. All the bookmakers and pundits thought we were going to go down, and I got in a room with my players, closed the doors and windows and said: “Listen to that outside noise. Please use it to fuel us, because we are not going down. That is a fact. We’re going to do something special, but only us in here know that.”

The first game of the season, we played Bradford City, one of the teams in the promotion hunt, and we beat them. The second game, we played Salford, who were in the play-offs the season before. We drew the game, but we were better than them. The third game we played was MK Dons, who had just come down from League One, so a  big side, big club, good players, and we beat them. Then all of a sudden, you could see that the players think, ‘Hold on a minute. We could do something.’ 

We’ve got this togetherness, and we use it as an us against the world mentality. It really works. 

Lindsey on the play-offs

I didn’t have to manage myself or my emotions because I felt as if this is what I was made to do. I felt really confident. I called it the law of attraction to the players; the more I said we would do something special, the more they started believing it. When it got to the back end of the season, I kept saying, ‘Nobody is really taking charge of that final play-off spot. Everyone’s messing around with it. Everybody wants that final play-off spot, but nobody’s doing anything about it. If we do something about it, I’m telling you now, I will back us against anybody across two legs in the semi-finals, and I’ll back you against anybody at Wembley. If we get in that last place, we’ll get promoted.’

Playing MK Dons in the semi-final was a tough task in itself, because we knew Mike Williamson is a very, very good manager. They’ve got excellent players. They have a really clear way of playing which is not too dissimilar from the way we play – leading into the play-offs, I enjoyed my time watching them. We won 3-0 in the first game at our place, and I felt that I got my tactics spot-on. I remember being interviewed before the second game and being asked, basically, ‘Do you stick or twist? You’re 3-0 up. Do you park the bus?’ I was like, ‘Nah, we’re not parking no bus, mate. We’re all-out attack again. We’re going to go for it and press and we’re not going to change. I won’t change.’ We went into that second leg with the same attitude as we did the first. In that first game, I didn’t want to be cagey. I didn’t want to sit in and see what they were doing. I wanted us to step forward and take the game to them, and we did, and then I said to the players, ‘We are doing that again when we play at their place. We’re not going to come off the gas, we’re going to step forward, we’re going to try and score early. We’re going to try and put this game to bed.’ 

We ended up winning 8-1 on aggregate, and I honestly believe it was those two games that won us promotion. We would have gone from Milton Keynes that night we played them, straight to Wembley, played Crewe and beaten them. That’s how fired-up the players were, and I had to calm them down. 

Lindsey on Wembley

The boys were ready. They were so ready. I calmed them down a little bit and just said, “Look, I want you to play the game and not the occasion. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true. This is a game of football. Forget the stadium, forget the surroundings, forget the big crowd. We’re here to do a job. Yes, it’s a brilliant day out for all our families. Yes, it’s a brilliant day out for all the fans. We’ve made history by just being here, boys. I’m not here just to make history. I want to win.”

I tried to make the lads focus on their job as individuals and collectively, as a team, and we really had the mindset to go and do that job. We sorted all the match tickets out on one day, we did all our media on one day, and then spent the three days before the match concentrating on the job of playing football and beating Crewe. Because the boys were so confident, they were never going to lose that game.