MISSION IS ACCOMPLISHED

FOR Crawley Town midfielder Ben Smith, the summer of 2010 began with a rather awkward request.

- CHRIS DUNLAVY

“I was due a bit of a signing-on fee and I hadn’t got it,” said Smith, who had joined the Red Devils from Hereford United 12 months earlier.

“And I vividly remember calling the manager, Steve Evans. I was tiptoeing around, going ‘Look, I know it’s pre-season and money is always tight but when is it coming?’

“He just started laughing and said ‘Money tight? What are you on about?’ He told me we’d be going for promotion, that he’d be signing all these players, all sorts of other bits.

“With Steve, you don’t always take things at face value. But I got the money the next day, then all these big names started walking through the door. It was like ‘Wow… it’s really happening’.”

And it was. Crawley Town, a club synonymous with mismanagement, crisis, and financial peril was suddenly the Manchester City of Non-League. In three months, Broadfield morphed into a red carpet as the cream of the Conference arrived to join what Evans called ‘Project Promotion’.

Matt Tubbs, who would go on to score a staggering 37 league goals, was a £70,000 signing from Salisbury. Pablo Mills came from Rotherham, Michel Kuipers from Brighton and Scotty Neilson from Bradford City.

Peterborough, meanwhile, were handed £100,000 for playmaker Sergio Torres whilst York City pocketed £225,000 for Richard Brodie, a Conference record that remains unbroken.