Mark Sheridan dedicated Crawley AC's battling third place in their opening British League division four match of the season to former team-mate Ed Prickett.

A minute's silence was ob-served at Norwich on Saturday and Crawley's athletes wore black arm bands in memory of the 21-year-old who died when he was hit by a car last Sunday.

It was the club's first match since the tragic accident and Crawley rose to the occasion with an impressive display. None more so than Paul Rogers who knocked more than ten seconds off his 5,000m personal best to come third in 15min. 04sec.

Team manager Mark Sheridan said: "It was a pretty hard day for us but Ed was a winner in life and we just tried to do him proud. Paul was one of Ed's closest friends and it was obvious a lot of emotion went into his run."

Matt Barclay was the star, winning the long jump with a leap of 7.01m and finishing second in both sprints. Lee Walker took the pole vault with a clearance of 4.70m while Josh Lamb threw a personal best of 45.77m to come second in the discus.

Sheridan said: "It was a great start to the season considering the difficult circumstances and the fact we didn't have our strongest team out.

"We would love to go straight back up to division three after relegation last year and this result gives us a good base to work on once we get some key athletes back."