Crawley boss Richie Barker spoke to his club's official website ahead of his side's League One match against Carlisle at Brunton Park on Saturday afternoon, Barker first talking about United's managerial situation:
“It was a shame to see Greg Abbott leave, he had been there a long time and things obviously didn’t work out, he didn’t get very long at the start of the season. But, Graham Kavanagh has been there a few years now as a player and a coach and is somebody I know really well. He has taken his chance really well, obviously as a caretaker I think he won three out of three so I think it was a no-brainer to give him the job and he has taken that on. Greg had obviously been there a long time so he had set in stone the way he wanted to play and he was successful with that over the years.
“In turn once Kav took over I think he has added slightly more possession to it, and I would have to say I watched them play and they keep the ball really well. A really nice big pitch, so it should lead to again another good football match. I watched their Wolves game yesterday on DVD and there wasn’t a lot in the game to be fair, you certainly wouldn’t have looked at one team and said they were bottom half and the other team were in the top three, so there wasn’t a lot in the game.
“We do the best we can with what we have got in terms of the preparation, and we will do everything we can in terms of making sure that we travel at the right time and train at the right time. All you can do is the best that you can and hope that it pays off, and we think we are going to have done everything that we can. We will make sure that we are going to have a couple of days up there, and I am sure at some point people will say that it happens everywhere.
“But, it is a hell of a long way and it must be one of the longest trips in the Football League this year I think so we will do the best we can. We did cross over the border for ten minutes or so and train at Gretna last year and it just shows you how far it is when you are talking about training in Scotland. But, we are staying in a slightly different place this year and we are going to train somewhere different on the Friday, and hopefully the attempts to do the right things and prepare in the right way will pay off.
“It has certainly made a difference for us coming in on a Monday morning with a win behind us, I’d say that it has not stopped raining for about 48 hours now, which made training extremely difficult on the Monday. It is going to be tough today as well, we are going to have to go elsewhere I think, so that that sort of throws a few spanners in the works and we have to shift a lot of things about. But, it is what it is and we will get on with it, but to be fair to the players they have been good and it certainly changed their mindset.
“We have got four tough games coming up now and I have got an idea of a target which would put us back on where we want to be. We say it regular though, no easy games, Carlisle away who are doing reasonably well at the minute and you actually take those three or four games away from them at the start of the season and if you started the league then they would probably be in the top ten."