Salford City v Crawley Town preview: Can Reds get one over Manchester United legend and his his side?

Salford are well known for their rise up the leagues, due to the investment from the class of 92.

The owners have invested heavily to get Salford in this position, and this is only the third ever meeting between the two sides. Salford are yet to beat Crawley and yet to even score against them after Crawley won the fixture at the People’s Pension Stadium 2-0 and the fixture at the Peninsula Stadium ended 0-0.

Salford will be looking to claim victory from Crawley for the first time, and prior to Tuesday have only lost one league game all season.

That game was Paul Scholes’ first game in charge and ended in a 1-0 defeat to Port Vale. Other than that Salford have started the season strongly, despite the sacking of manager Graham Alexander, after their 2-2 draw with Tranmere Rovers.

The Salford hierarchy clearly have high ambitions for the season and Paul Scholes is currently in temporary charge but that could all change if a permanent appointment is made before Saturday’s game.

Ian Henderson will be Salford’s danger man and someone the Crawley defence will need to keep a close eye on or he could score plenty of goals. Henderson signed for Salford from Rochdale in the summer, where he was a prolific goal scorer even at League One level. He’s took the step down to League Two and will need to be kept quiet or he could cause the Crawley defence huge problems.

He demonstrated this when the Grimsby defence couldn’t handle him and he bagged himself a hat-trick as Salford beat Grimsby 4-0 on the second day of the season.

Crawley’s centre back pairing of Jordan Tunnicliffe and Tony Craig have started every league game together thus far and will have the job of keeping Henderson under control. They demonstrated how well they can defend in last week's 4-0 victory at home to Morecambe.

The Cawley back line only looked troubled on a couple of occasions and kept Morecambe quiet for the majority of the game. A repeat of that here would give Crawley an excellent chance of picking up some points on the road.