Crawley Town owner reveals change of formation for Doncaster Rovers trip

Kevin Betsy’s men travel to Doncaster Rovers on Saturday (September 24) having won only one of their nine opening League Two games, leaving them in 20th place. They have only scored eight goals in those nine games and Johnson revealed on a Twitter Spaces with Reds fans on Thursday night things are going to change.

The Twitter Space was organised by Reds fan Bruce Wells in response to the club’s announcement of their partnership with The Sidemen, which could see scouted players appear in Crawley’s FA Cup first round squad. This announcement angered fans who saw it as making the club a ‘laughing stock’ and taking focus away from on-the-field matters. Johnson appeared on the Space to answer any questions, explains what it means and try to reassure the Reds faithful that it will not affect what happens on the pitch.

He told the Crawley fans: “I don't want to just tell people to trust me, but part of it is you have to trust us. We know how bad we've been in attack on the pitch again. Five years of statsbomb data, we are 120th out of 120 teams in XG (Expected goals – a new football metric, which allows you to evaluate team and player performance) Our creation and our attack and our chances are not there. I probably shouldn’t say this but I think we're changing the formation for Saturday. That’s not giving too much away. It's not kind of like we're gonna lose our edge on it. We're going to be adjusting to try to create more of an attack because that's where our biggest weakness.”

Johnson also talked about how the partnership with The Sidemen was already having a positive effect on the club.

He said: “We were trending in the UK and we had two big brands reach out to us today that said ‘holy cr*p what did you guys do today? This is amazing we think we could really help build this project in this story and they want to aprtner up in some fashion.”

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