15 hours ago
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The first task for Steve Evans in his opening match as Bristol Rovers manager was to avoid defeat, to start winning points again. Doing so at Crewe Alexandra, albeit with his new side playing against 10 men for more than an hour, at least removed an early monkey from his back.
Ahead is something far trickier, a task that would daunt many other managers, as the veteran coach seeks to fire the League Two strugglers – hitherto on a 10-game losing streak that had taken them into the relegation zone – up the division. The ultimate goal? To clamber on to an equal footing with Bristol City.
That was Evans’s mission statement after taking the job at the Memorial Stadium, though this 1-1 draw 136 miles north at Crewe’s Gresty Road perhaps shows how much work he must do just to keep the Gas in the Football League, let alone reach League One or the Championship, where City kicked off the weekend in 11th.
After being unveiled as manager on Tuesday, Evans doubled down on his belief that Rovers have been “operating at a level in the pyramid way below where they should be”. “I’ve thought that for a number of years. There’s two proud football clubs in this city, but I’ve genuinely always believed that Bristol Rovers can be a big, big club. The first thing we have to do to be on an equal platform [with City] is to win some games.”
The morale-crushing 10 defeats on the bounce spelled the end for Darrell Clarke, a figure previously beloved at the club for overseeing successive promotions in 2015 and 2016 but who ran woefully short of ideas by the end of that sequence. Rovers soon identified Evans as the ideal man to lift them out of the funk. A phone call with the director of football, Ricky Martin, in which Evans insisted on an initial short-term contract until the end of the season and was promised January funds, sealed the deal.
The performance at Crewe was far from a dream beginning, but it offered hope for the weeks ahead, as does Evans’s track record. He has certainly navigated similarly choppy waters before. When he took over Stevenage in March 2022 they were sitting near the League Two relegation zone after a nine-match winless run. Mansfield had lost one of their past 11 when Evans was handed that job in November 2016. He steered both clubs, and plenty of others, to League Two safety and beyond.
Evans has appeared reinvigorated in his Bristol Rovers tracksuit this week and on the touchline at Crewe, perhaps a consequence of his dramatic weight loss – he has lost eight stone since his last managerial spell at Rotherham – as much as being motivated by the return to management. But now 63 and with more than 700 games as an EFL manager, he is back where he belongs.
There is no doubt the Scot, who has asked the club to put him up in a Bristol hotel with its own pool so he can maintain his daily 6am swim of 70 to 80 lengths, was thrown into the deep end with this opening assignment at Crewe. The Alex have not lost at home in the league since mid-October and pressed home their early advantage when Emre Tezgel was picked out by Reece Hutchinson and smashed home inside nine minutes.
Rovers may have been forgiven for caving in after the early concession. Many teams languishing in the relegation zone after 10 successive defeats would have wobbled – but they fought back quickly. It took Callum Morton less than three minutes to find a leveller, pouncing on indecision in the Crewe defence after a ball over the top and rounding the goalkeeper Sam Waller to score on his first Rovers start.
Crewe’s Adrien Thibaut was then sent off for an act of violent conduct against Clinton Mola and suddenly Evans’s side found themselves in the ascendancy. Tezgel, the hosts’ top scorer, was forced off with an injury and the game appeared there for the taking. But Rovers, despite an improved display, could not seize it in the second half. Kamil Conteh hit the woodwork late on but the 10 men clung on.
It’s a mark of Evans’s ambition that he was “frustrated and disappointed” with a point – despite it being Rovers’s first since 27 September and lifting them from 91st to 90th in the Football League, where they stayed on Saturday as Harrogate lost at home to MK Dons. “We know tonight we’ve left two points in Crewe,” he said, while admitting confidence is still in short supply among his squad. “I think those players, quite rightly, have received criticism from every angle,” he said.
“The players have been beaten and their brows are down but I’ve tried to work with them. It’s a testament to the boys in the dressing room that we came back from a goal down. But we’ve had two days on the training ground with the boys. We’ll be better after two weeks and after two months. I’m looking forward to January to make this group how I would like it to be.”
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