The 42-year-old stepped up to his current position after two Olympic campaigns as assistant coach and succeeded Jason Lee when he was appointed as head coach of the women's team.

"I'm confident we can put ourselves in a position to medal in Rio, yes," Crutchley (pictured top) told insidethegames at the unveiling of NOW: Pensions as the teams' new sponsor in London this week.

"I believe through hard work we can achieve it."

As reported by insidethegames last month, Crutchley hinted at a significant overhaul of the teams as they prepare for not only the 2016 Olympics but also the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

This was evidenced in the naming of a new 30-strong Britain and England men's squad this week, with some noticeable names missing from the line-up and about half the team being made up of relatively new faces to the senior international scene.


The squad, which is now training in a new centralised programme, includes a number of the players from London 2012, including captain Barry Middleton, Richard Smith and Nick Catlin, with Ashley Jackson, Rob Moore, Dan Fox, Iain Lewers, Harry Martin and George Pinner also returning to the side.

Alongside the Olympians, the experience of Simon Mantell, Adam Dixon, Alastair Brogdon and Mark Gleghorne has also been called upon, and following impressive debuts in the Champions Trophy in December several players have been recalled, including Dan Shingles, Henry Weir, Ben Arnold and Ollie Willars.

Although Crutchley has every confidence in his new line-up, he admits there may be some teething problems in the initial settling in period and hints at further changes in the years to come.


"I think in the short term there'll be some challenges because of the number of changes but our job is to get ourselves in the best position as possible going into Rio and that's why we've chosen the squad we have," he explained.

"Coming out of a home Olympics where we had so many players who'd already done two Olympic cycles and where we were one of the older teams in London it was always natural that we were going to evolve and quite a few changes were going to be made.

"I'm still confident we've got a strong core of players with experience that we can do well, but we've also got our eye on being as good as we can be in three years or three-and-a-half years moving into Rio as our priority and it's always a balance between seeing here and now and developing people for then.

"Luckily we've got them in central training now and so we identified players we felt we could really develop in that period and some of the players that were in London have either retired or chosen to have time away so they potentially could come back but we'll have to wait and see.

"The job for the youngsters is to make sure they're so good that there is no space for them to come back.

"I don't expect half of that squad to change over the next few years but there will still be some changes with players coming in and out of the team as performances change.

"We'll continue to watch domestic club level, our junior teams and the home nations to try to identify players who may come into the group."

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