Colin Kazim-Richards is under no illusions about the size of the task at Crawley Town. Seven games into the League Two season, the club sits bottom of the table. Yet the head coach, working alongside his assistant Julian Gray, is sure better times lie ahead, and he argues the league position tells only part of the story.
The pair arrived at Crawley in April and kept the club in the Football League, securing survival on the final day to avoid relegation to the National League. That rescue act has been followed by a heavy summer of change, and Kazim-Richards believes the results are lagging behind the work done on the training ground. “The results are not showing the work we’ve done; it’s more a case of when the process is going to start showing,” he 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.”
The challenge, he says, is far broader than a quick fix. It involves recruitment, gelling players in terms of character and mentality, and implementing a new structure and a new standard across the club rather than just the football side. “It’s not a task that is just a week, two weeks, or a three-week process,” he adds. “It ultimately falls down on the results. We know that, and it’s something that we’re working to change.”
Kazim-Richards took the job after a spell coaching at Arsenal’s academy, hired by Raphael Khalili, whose KB Sports and Leisure took charge of Broadfield Stadium in a change of ownership last year. His appointment made him only the third black head coach across the top four tiers of English football, alongside Nuno Espírito Santo at West Ham and Lee Grant at Walsall. Asked whether a glass ceiling remains, he is blunt. “Of course,” he says. “There’s a lot of black coaches who are good and deserve an opportunity, 100%.”
He insisted Gray became his assistant when he discussed the Crawley job with Khalili. The two came through the Arsenal academy at different times. Gray was part of the first-team squad between 1996 and 2000, making a single appearance, and his clubs include Crystal Palace, Coventry and Fulham. Seven years Gray’s junior, Kazim-Richards never made it to the Arsenal first team but watched him closely. “He’s someone that we would look at and be like: ‘Raa, I want to be like Julian,'” he 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, 47, has coached youth-level groups at Arsenal’s Hale End academy as well as at Birmingham, another of his former clubs, and explains how that experience is serving him at Crawley. “You learn different things, and you also want to challenge yourself,” he says. “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, and that’s always been a big thing for me.”
The wider context at Crawley has been turbulent in recent times. John Yems, who managed the club between 2019 and 2022, was handed 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.
Kazim-Richards also addressed the dismissal of Jermain Defoe, sacked by the National League side Woking after only four months and six games in charge. The two did their coaching badges together, and while Kazim-Richards says he has not spoken to him, he is wary of the conclusions that could be drawn from the episode. “No way is it a slight to say Jermain is a black manager and he fails. White managers fail all the time, too,” he says. “But it’s going to be written like that because it’s Jermain Defoe and he’s a black man and he speaks out on some stuff, right? If you look around now, there’s a lot of young black coaches that are in the academies, in non-league, that are doing well.”
Now 40, Kazim-Richards played for both Fenerbahce and Galatasaray and, through his maternal heritage, qualified to represent Turkey. This is his first managerial role, and he is “100% committed” to drawing on that experience alongside Gray and taking Crawley to the Championship, a core ambition of the club’s owners. “Short term it’s about getting results, and then being able to get us up there,” he says. “You’re not just going to do it with the click of the fingers. Do we need time? Yes, we do. I see this as the start of the journey, but I believe we can go far and achieve those objectives. We’d love to be given that time.”