Harry Kewell’s Crawley leave it late to beat Chesterfield

Posted Sunday, February 04, 2018 by PA

Crawley manager Harry Kewell was delighted after his in-form side kept going to beat Chesterfield in stoppage time.

The Red Devils recovered from Louis Reed’s first-half opener to win 2-1, thanks impressive debutant Karlan Ahearne-Grant’s equaliser and Lewis Young’s winner in the third minute of added time.

Kewell’s side have won six of their last seven League Two games and the former Leeds and Liverpool winger was happy with his side’s perseverance.

The Australian said: “In football, games don’t last 90 minutes do they? We’ve seen numerous games finish in the dying seconds, 93rd, 94th or 95th minutes of the match, so you just need to keep believing what you’re capable of doing and when chances come you’ve got to take them.

“Karlan took the game to them right from the start, I think he shocked them. But Chesterfield then got into the game, got into their rhythm and on a day like this on a wet surface you’ve got to shoot, you may get a deflection and that happened (for Reed’s goal).

“After the goal we picked up but lacked that little bit in the final third. We weren’t fully committed to the chances we were trying to create but in the second half, they stuck to the game plan and we started to create chances.

“The game turned into a typical League Two game until Jimmy Smith’s little back-heel set up Lewis to win it.”

Chesterfield, who slipped back into the drop zone, saw goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale make some decent saves and they looked good value for a point until the last-gasp heartache.

Manager Jack Lester said: “We should never have lost the game.

“It was always going to be a tight game and we felt if we could get ahead we could go on and win it. We got ahead and we were pleased enough with the first half even though they were causing us one or two problems but from that position at half-time, we thought we would go on and win the game.

“We were a little bit on the back foot trying to protect what we’d got and they scored a good individual goal and had 10 minutes when they were strong. But we injected new legs and we were attacking towards the end but we didn’t capitalise on it.”