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AFC Wimbledon and Crawley Town both started their League Two journeys last weekend without a win. But the Life’s A Pitch panel still expects the Football League newcomers to realise their promotion hopes in the near future.

AFC Wimbledon went down 3-2 at home to Bristol Rovers, while Crawley Town were denied an opening day away win by a late Port Vale equaliser.

And while much of the fanfare has been around AFC Wimbledon, Dominic Fifield of the Guardian believes Crawley have both the ability and the finances to work their way up the Football League. “I think Crawley will do really well,” he says. “The lad up front [Matt] Tubbs is a great little player and could be playing at a much higher level than that.

“There’s a lot going right at Crawley. It depends whether it’s built on sand or not – we’ll find out in the years to come. But at the moment there’s a lot of momentum behind them, there’s still money behind them. And you can see, unlike some of the other clubs that have come out of non-league football, they’ve got the capabilities and the financial clout there to progress quite quickly into the higher echelons.”

John Cross of the Daily Mirror thinks that Crawley’s runaway Conference title win last season has rightly raised expectations of them in League Two. “I do think Crawley, having won by such a margin last year immediately puts them up among the favourites,” he explains. “They’re already the bookies’ favourites to win the title, so I think they’ll be interesting.”

Meanwhile, Martin Lipton of the Daily Mirror feels that AFC Wimbledon have a bright future despite having their defensive frailties exposed by Bristol Rovers. ”It was a fairly quick introduction to the realities,” he explains. “[But] they are going to continue to move incrementally in the right direction in the next few years. But they’ve got to survive this year, because it’s not going to be easy.”

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