‘Is there still a glass ceiling? Of course’: Kazim-Richards fights for breakthrough at Crawley

Colin Kazim-Richards accepts the enormity of the task of improving the situation at Crawley Town, who sit bottom of League Two after seven games. But on the evidence of what he’s seen, the head coach is sure better times lie ahead.

On a late summer’s afternoon at Crawley’s training ground in Sussex, Kazim-Richards, sat alongside his assistant, Julian Gray, the pair arriving at Crawley in April and managing to save the club from relegation to the National League on the final day, speaks of the challenges ahead and how the team’s league position only tells part of the story.

“The results are not showing the work we’ve done; it’s more a case of when the process is going to start showing,” Kazim-Richards 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. It’s not a task that is just a week, two weeks, or a three-week process.

“As players you don’t really understand what it entails as a manager. You’re trying to churn out results within trying to do the process that you want. The recruitment, gelling people character-wise, mentality-wise, implementing a new structure, implementing a new standard within the club, and not just the football side. But it ultimately falls down on the results. We know that, and it’s something that we’re working to change.”

Kazim-Richards and Gray came through the Arsenal academy as players, albeit at different times. Gray was part of the first-team squad from 1996 to 2000, making a single appearance. Seven years his junior, Kazim-Richards never made it to the first team but kept an eye on Gray and identified a role model he could emulate. “He’s someone that we would look at and be like: ‘Raa, I want to be like Julian,’” Kazim-Richards 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, whose clubs include Crystal Palace, Coventry and Fulham, has coached youth-level groups at Arsenal’s Hale End academy, as well as at Birmingham, another of his former clubs. He explains how that experience is serving him at Crawley. “You learn different things, and you also want to challenge yourself,” says the 47-year-old.

“I always believe that I’m coaching to help the players be better and pass on my knowledge and experience. It’s the same whatever age group I coach. 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. I need to know what they need, and for the best way to give them that information.”

Crawley has been a place of turmoil in recent times, with John Yems, who managed the club between 2019 and 2022, 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. Last year, there was a change of ownership at Broadfield Stadium, with KB Sports and Leisure, headed by Raphael Khalili, taking charge. It was Khalili who hired Kazim-Richards, who was coaching at Arsenal’s academy at the time. In the process he became only the third black head coach across the top four tiers of English football, the other two being Nuno Espírito Santo at West Ham and Lee Grant at Walsall. “Is there still a glass ceiling? Of course,” says Kazim-Richards, who insisted Gray became his assistant when discussing the Crawley job with Khalili. “There’s a lot of black coaches who are good and deserve an opportunity, 100%.”

I ask about the former England forward Jermain Defoe, who was sacked at the National League side Woking after only four months and six games in charge. Kazim-Richards knows Defoe – the two did their coaching badges together – and despite his insistence on there being a glass ceiling when it comes to black coaches, he feels the wrong conclusions could be drawn from that episode. “I haven’t spoken to Jermaine. What I will say is, there’s a lot at this level and below that goes on that you might not expect,” says the 40-year-old. “No way is it a slight to say Jermain is a black manager and he fails. White managers fail all the time, too. 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.”

Kazim-Richards, who played for both Fenerbahce and Galatasaray and through maternal heritage qualified to represent Turkey, has decades’ worth of experience to draw reference from in what is his first managerial role. He is “100% committed” to making use of that 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,” says Kazim-Richards. “You’re not just going to do it with the click of the fingers – if that was the case, Crawley would have done so already.

“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.”