Dean Saunders is determined to avoid a hat-trick of relegations as Crawley battle to beat the drop

He scored goals and won trophies with both Liverpool and Aston Villa, but Dean Saunders is unsure whether he will go and watch his old teams’ FA Cup semi-final meeting on Sunday.

After all, for the former Wales striker, the really big game this weekend takes place at Crawley Town’s Broadfield Stadium against Notts County – and the outcome will determine his plans for the following day. “If we win on Saturday I might go but if we don’t, I’ll stay in bed with a sheet over my head,” says Crawley’s interim manager.

Saunders may be smiling but he appreciates better than anyone the significance of the match for a Crawley side who are third-bottom of League One with three games remaining.

They sit level on points with Notts County and Saunders feels two more wins are needed to prolong Crawley’s three-year stay in the third tier: “We’re on 47 points and 53 points should be enough,” he notes.

Plenty of people, including Graeme Souness, whom he worked with as assistant manager at Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United, told Saunders to decline the offer to step into the shoes of John Gregory, when the latter stepped aside in late December to undergo heart surgery, given that he was risking an unwanted hat-trick of relegations as a manager, after previous demotions from the Championship with Doncaster Rovers and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

“I took this job on with the odds that relegation would be on my CV so is it my fault or the people before me?” asks the 50-year-old, sitting in Broadfield Stadium’s modest boardroom. “Was Wolves my fault? Was Doncaster [who had three wins in 35 games prior to his appointment]? You are trying to retrieve a situation.”

Saunders, who began his coaching career as John Toshack’s No 2 with Wales, has had a topsy-turvy time in management but the context is worth noting. He led Wrexham to the 2011 Conference play-offs before leaving for Doncaster where, after relegation in the summer of 2012, he put together the team that lifted the League One title the following May. By that stage, he was at Molineux, which meant he ended the campaign, bizarrely, with a championship medal – “the Doncaster chairman gave me a winner’s medal” – as well as relegation and the sack.

“I cut the budget from eight million to two and a half and got the chance to build my own team,” he says of Doncaster. “They went and won the league.”

At Wolves, by contrast, he adds: “I didn’t leave them with a bad player as I didn’t sign any. Normally if you sign bad players – or good players – and they don’t win, then you hold your hand up and say, ‘Right, I’ve spent all your money and you’ve not got a very good team, you can sack me.’ But I was the fourth manager in a year and I had the same players who got the other three the sack. I’d sorted two clubs out from a mess [and] if I’d had the time I think eventually I would have sorted it.”

Instead, there followed 19 months out of the game before Crawley came calling. In that time he followed the fortunes of his son, Callum – a forward at Crewe Alexandra – as well as watching games and “writing lists of players up that I could get when I did get back in”.

It was a useful exercise for his salvage operation in Sussex. “I have not spent any money really but because Joe [Walsh] went [to MK Dons] and Matt Harrold went on loan I was able to bring nine players in,” he said. “Your own players want to do well for you, they feel they owe you something and buy into what you’re doing. That is the difference [from] Wolves [where] I hadn’t signed anyone.”

He has made Crawley better organised and hard to beat, and a run of four wins in six games up to Easter took them out of the bottom four. Although they slipped to 22nd after Tuesday’s 5-0 loss at Walsall – the consequence of an injury-decimated defence – Saunders has key centre-half Darren Ward back for the game and is optimistic.

“I knew it was going to come down to this,” he adds. “Everyone advised me not to do it, but I took the challenge on. I could have quite easily stayed playing golf but now we’re two wins away from doing it and it’s job done.”