'It was a really poor performance from us today and we’re really disappointed' - Crawley Town skipper after Cambridge United defeat

Joe Ironside opened the scoring for the U’s, before Jake Hessenthaler equalised with his first goal for the club.

Kyle Knoyle put Cambridge back in front on the stroke of halftime, and Wes Hoolahan sealed the win late on.

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Crawley captain George Francomb was disappointed with his side’s performance on a tough afternoon at the Abbey Stadium: “Not good enough really, from start to finish. I feel like just before the equaliser we got in our stride, how we know we can play, got that really good equaliser and I thought ‘we’ve got these now’, but we just didn’t get going again. It was a really poor performance from us today and we’re really disappointed.”

“I just don’t think we quite got in the rhythm, we were second to everything for large parts of the game, and even with the ball I just don’t think we were as potent or as fluid as we usually are. The pitch was terrible but it’s the same for both teams. We’ve just got to dust ourselves down and go again on Tuesday and make sure that it’s not two bad performances in a row."

Ironside’s opener came from a set-piece, and Francomb admits the Reds were caught off guard: “I don’t really know what happened there, to be honest. It looked like it was not the greatest delivery, a little bit under hit, and I don’t know whether he (Ironside) got a touch on it or if it just seemed to confuse everyone and end up in the back of the net, it happens, but we reacted well and got a really, really good goal, one of our best goals this season, probably, and I thought that would lift us but we didn’t quite put those patterns together again, and exploit our strengths.

"Fair play to them, they’re a hard-working team and they’ve done us today.”

“Another thing you have to remember is we’ve got a lot of new faces coming into the team, and they have to get used to the way we play, we haven’t been training, we’ve had a lot of (positive) COVID tests, but we don’t want to make excuses we’ve just got to be better next game.”

Crawley are in action again on Tuesday the 2nd of December as they welcome Leyton Orient to the People’s Pension Stadium for a 7:00pm kick-off.