Olly Huddlestone spreads the Crawley Town gospel
When Reds' fan Olly Huddlestone went travelling in September we gave him a home shirt and told him to spread the Crawley Town gospel to as many football fans in as many far-flung parts of the world as he could. Here's his latest blog.
After snorkelling the Great Barrier Reef I headed south to Airlie beach to sail, swim and … more snorkelling!
I lived on a boat for three days sailing around the Whitsundays and visited Whitehaven beach, commonly in the top three beaches in the world! The boat was largely filled with South Americans all partying and speaking Spanish, but I managed to find the only other English people within two minutes of boarding.
Again, football was the conversation starter and we were immediately on to the subject of the Reds.
Zach (pictured) was 19 from Worcester, and had the closest link to Crawley Town I had come across on my travels so far. He was in the youth team at Cheltenham Town when Mark Yates had his successful five-year spell at the club, leading them to two successive play-offs finishes.
Zach supported Arsenal and after a dismal start to their Champions League campaign he was impressed with the performance against Bayern Munich and most notably the recent form of Mesut Ozil.
An idea for a January transfer swoop maybe, the German star would look good swapping red and white for red and black?
As the hours went by we started chatting to a Chilean and Argentinian who were room mates, studying in Australia. They were taunting each other about
Chile's Copa America success and how Argentina haven't had enough bottle in the last two major competitions, losing both in the final.
When we started talking about Reds the Argentinian immediately started screaming "Sergio Torres, Sergio Torres!" He knew of the former Reds' favourite South American from his time in his home town in Argentina.
I asked whether he'd seen much of Torres' time in England but he'd only seen one clip, albeit probably the most important of them all - the injury time screamer against Derby in the third round of the FA Cup back in 2011.
For a League Two club, Crawley really have caught the eyes of an impressive number of people from all over the world.
