It is transitions week at Crawley Town and new manager Kevin Betsy is explaining to his squad before training how he wants them to play. At times this summer, he has shown them clips of Manchester City and Arsenal but here, he shows footage of Crawley’s 2-2 draw away to Hearts from the previous weekend.
He is thrilled at how many problems Crawley caused a team who will be in the Europa League play-off round in late August, and hopes this will only grow the belief in their new direction.
When it comes to the drills themselves, everything is precisely planned and explained. Eight minutes of boxes, eight minutes of plyometrics, then a 12-minute pressing exercise, 25 minutes of “intensive games” and then one 20-minute “transition game” to finish.
Each drill is taken by a different member of staff, including Betsy’s former colleague at the FA and Arsenal Dan Micciche, and Darren Byfield, a former Jamaica forward who spent most of his playing career in the English second tier. The whole session is filmed by an overhead drone, manned by the club’s analysis intern, so the players can watch it back with their lunch afterwards.
Betsy spent last season as under-23s manager with Arsenal (Photo: David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Even if the session takes place at Isthmian Premier Division side Horsham, everything feels professional, purposeful and measured. The players’ hydration levels are checked before the session and those who do not provide a urine sample before the morning meeting will be fined.
Other members of staff confide to The Athletic that they have never seen this forensic attention to detail before. One long-standing employee says that the arrival of Betsy and his team makes him feel like he has started a new job himself. Another says he has never seen a coach as good as Betsy at clearly explaining his ideas about football and how he wants the players to play.
The whole place has an air of newness. Not just for Crawley’s first game of the season (away to Carlisle United on Saturday), but for Betsy’s first game as a senior first-team manager. He had been one of the most highly rated youth coaches in the country at Fulham, England and Arsenal before getting his first senior job last month.
But it does make you wonder, watching the quality of the people here, and the quality of training, how all of this is happening at Crawley Town?
Crawley, for those who do not follow League Two closely, were bought earlier this year by WAGMI United, a group of American investors who had tried and failed to buy Bradford City.
Their promise was to use their expertise in the worlds of crypto and NFTs, with innovative ideas such as selling tokens to fans which gave them input on club policy. This made Crawley English football’s first club owned by crypto investors, but surely not the last. All of this, it should be remembered, was before the collapse of the NFT and crypto markets. Whether the promises of April can survive the collapse of June, well, only time will tell.
When WAGMI bought the club, it inherited John Yems as manager, who was suspended in late April after reports that he had allegedly used racist language to players, which led to his departure in early May. One of the first things Betsy did …….
Source: https://theathletic.com/3449999/2022/07/27/kevin-betsy-crawley-wagmi-crypto-nft/