Crawley Town hoping to repeat last season's heroics at AFC Wimbledon to bounce back from disappointing Salford City defeat

The Reds boss said he has got the reaction he wanted from the squad in training this week as they prepare for the local derby. Crawley have been on a run of good form away from home, winning three of the last four games on their travels and they have last year’s 1-0 win at Plough Lane to draw back on.

But in more recent memory, they lost 2-1 at home to The Dons following a very poor first half. Lindsey, however, says they must focus on what they need to do to get a result this weekend.

"It’s one where we're excited for, a local derby away from home,” he said. “We won there last year, and hopefully, we'll get the same sort of result this season. We're really looking forward to it and we are having a really good week in training. After a poor performance on Saturday, we debriefed Monday got that out of the way and drew a line and press ahead to the next game. The reaction from the players has been spot on.”

And Lindsey was not surprised by the response from the players. “I suppose I expected that anyway,” he said, ”because I know what the group are like, you know, I think there was noon, probably more disappointed than the lads themselves. They knew that they didn't play and perform well. It happens, like I've said before, football is a very small scoring sport, albeit it could have been a lot more than it was. We know we didn't perform very well. “But the lads are really honest, they're an honest group. And they're a hard working group and they really focussed now.

“Sometimes it’s not a bad thing top perform that badly and we can press the reset button and go again.”

Will Lindsey be drawing on the last performance against Wimbledon in December? “Of course, I think we have to, certainly after that first half, we weren't at the races at all,” he said. “When we debriefed that game, I showed one clip, that was all I needed to show which kind of mirrored what the whole performance was about. I'm not going to go through the details of that clip but it mirrored everything. And we know what we've got to do. We know that we've got to compete with a really good side.

"It’s a different game but we will be taking some bits from the game that we played recently but more so on the attitude of our players than anything really tactical, or, there's nothing tactical. They may go for more of the shape they played against because they had success with it. But what we have to do is really focus on ourselves.”

Lindsey also said he is hoping for a repeat of the game at Plough Lane in March. He said: “I’ve got good memories of that game. It was a big day, wasn't it? You know, we've come off the back of quite a few losses and I think we'd played Harrogate and beat them. And then we obviously went to Wimbledon and it was a big day for us and we really needed to win that game.

“So yeah, good memories of that. I'm hoping that we have much of the same and hopefully the support will be as good as it has been.”