No Christmas cheer for Creighton

In the first of the Christmas games package the Harriers came home from Crawley without a present from Santa after Mark Creighton got sent off as early as the seventh minute for a professional foul.  He was caught for pace and bought down Jamie Cook just as he was about to enter the penalty area and the referee had no qualms about taking his red card out immediately.  This was Marks first game back from suspension for five yellow cards.

He also seemed to have even less qualms about brandishing a card of any form at the Crawley players after they too were equally guilty of making poor challenges on a Harriers player.

The loss of Creighton meant a reshuffle of a side already without left back Lee Baker.  Brian Smikle took his place even though a more than capable Andy Ferrell could have done a job there.  It became even more crazy when the influential Martin Brittain was sacrificed to allow Luke Jones to come on.

We lost our main playmaker with that decision and ended up with an unbalanced side with a natural frontman at the back and an over saturated defensive midfield.

Amazingly it took Crawley another twenty minutes to take advantage of a depleted Harriers side.  They had been in full control of the game up to the sending off and continued to do so afterwards without really troubling Adam Bartlett in the visitors goal.

Their first goal came through Michael Malcolm when a mix up in the Harriers defence allowed him in to slip the ball under the advancing Harriers keeper to open the scoring.  Crawley continued to batter the Harriers for the remainder of the half both in their football and their one armed combat.  The referee chose to ignore their bullying tactics but then penalised any slight mis-demeanour by one of ours.

The half ended without any further goalmouth action from either side but that was mainly down to the way the Harriers defenders restricted the home side to long distance shots from outside the area.