HLTCO - 16/02/2012

The world in which we live has, in recent years at least, become a place where short-termism is king.

Economic problems are apparently to be solved by massive cuts to public services at a moments notice in the hope that it will all work out for the best. The way news, music and pretty much anything else is digested has been squeezed into 140 character boxes or five minute time slots so that it can all be seen and done in next to no time. Elsewhere, in the always hectic world of football, clubs seem to feel under more pressure than ever to succeed all of the time, leading, inevitably, to a slapdash form of hiring and firing that sees managers lose their jobs incredibly quickly after a bad spell.

Seldom do you see a coach, at any professional club, given time unless he is producing miraculous results. There have been two high profile casualties in recent weeks in the form of Simon Grayson and Mick McCarthy at Leeds and Wolves respectively.

Grayson managed Leeds for just over three years, a spell which saw him get them out of League One and help the club to cement themselves around the play-off places in the Championship. At the time of his sacking, Leeds were going well in the top half of the table, but the decision to relieve him of his duties was given this explanation:

"We have 18 games to go this season and are still within touching distance of the Play-Offs, but felt with the transfer window now closed we needed to make the change at this time in the belief that a new managerial team will be able to get more out of the existing squad of players and make the difference".

Quite who the Leeds board, and perhaps chiefly, Ken Bates thought was better placed to get the team into the play-offs than the man who knew the squad inside out, and was prepared to continue despite having his captain sold from underneath his feet is anyone's guess. The fans reacted angrily to the decision, but, ultimately, they are helpless. Now the club have Neil Redfearn acting as an interim coach, and have lost two and won one of the games under his stewardship, hardly play-off form.

In McCarthy's case, it was fan power as much as boardroom politics that proved his undoing. With the team struggling for form and needing a good result at home to local rivals West Brom, the wheels well and truly came off. After going in at half-time with the score at 1 - 1, the home side fell apart in the remaining 45 minutes, conceding four and exiting the field to a cocophony of booing from extremely unsatisfied supporters.

During his five and a half years as manager at Molineux, McCarthy transformed the side from one with a bloated wage bill and financial worries on the horizon, to a well drilled and formidable Championship outfit with some prudent purchases and rather a lot of hard graft. He eventually got the club promoted as Champions in the 2008-2009 season, having led the table for almost the entire season.

Two consecutive seasons of top flight football followed for the first time in 30 years, but the relationship quickly turned sour when, after a positive start to the season, the points stopped coming. It appears that the latest defeat was one too many for chairman Steve Morgan to handle who made the change almost immediately after the loss. The irony of the decision comes with the news that, at the time of writing, Alan Curbishley is the front runner for the job, a man who was let go by Charlton when the fans had also decided that they needed a new direction, just look where that got them.

It is with this in mind that I look at our draw with Bristol City on Tuesday night. With a two goal cushion going into the closing stages it appeared that we were well on our way to a comfortable victory, but then, with 15 minutes to go, they got one back.

The lead we had built ourselves now looked flimsy at best. The home side got their tails up, and, after nearly three minutes of additional time, they got their second goal. It was infuriating, upsetting and inexplicable for all concerned. The rage I displayed in the immediate aftermath could no doubt scare the wits out of numerous small children and perhaps, even some adults. Things were thrown around the room, it was ugly.

After roughly 30 minutes of the full time whistle being blown though, my thoughts began to mellow again. Yes, I was still at a loss to explain how we had thrown it away, but I started to think how I would have felt had we come back from two goals behind to snatch a draw at the death. I would have been ecstatic, and yet the same amount of points would have been awarded to us.

We were awful against Coventry at home earlier in the season but got two extremely late goals, won the game, and everyone went home happy, regardless of how awful we'd been for 88 minutes of the match itself.

That's the nature of the football fan in many ways. Forget the decent points tally, great young players and stability at the club for the first time in god knows how long, instead using the hour immediately after the game to call for the managers head, slate the team for lacking "bottle" and claim that we are going to be relegated even though we are sitting in 14th position.

The next morning, the anger has always cooled somewhat, with many having had time to rationalise the result in their own heads. When it comes down to it, this season will not be remembered for us losing a two goal lead at Ashton Gate, but it will be seen as the time which saw Freedman take control for his first full term, steady the ship and start to seriously build for the future.

With that in mind, it gave me huge pride to hear Reise Allassani had signed a professional deal with the club earlier this week. Having seen him at first hand on two or three occasssions I can definitely vouch for his potential, and the fact that he turned down a number of Premiership clubs to sign with us shows that he and his family believe that Crystal Palace is the best place for his development.

As frustrating as results like Tuesday's can be, it is only one tiny set-back which we have been unfortunate enough to encounter. For the foreesable future the club won't be allowing short-termism to take over our thought processes, so try and put the disappointment of Ashton Gate behind you and focus on what Reise will be doing to defences along with Zaha, Scannell, Williams and the rest, for years to come.

Until next time.

HLTCO - 08/02/2012

It often strikes me that being a football fan, for many, is not about enjoyment, but the constant search for perfection, which inevitably, can never be reached.

Take our current situation, nearly two years on from the nightmare of administration, a club legend at the helm, league stability, great young players, four incredibly enthusiastic owners, a cup semi-final appearance, and yet the desire to find something worth moaning about shines through brighter than any talk of progress by a section of our support.

Quite regularly, people describe me as someone who looks at our club through rose tinted spectacles. Maybe I am, but it does worry me that, regardless of all the good things going for us at the moment, some people only ever seem happy when there are decisions they can voice discontent over.

A case in point would be our lack of goals this season, a subject which is gathering more and more worriers with every passing week. Now, I can readily admit that in an ideal world we would be scoring two or three every week, sadly, we live in a reality that is far from ideal. Children are starving, polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate and Glenn Murray is not Superman.

Despite this, Dougie and his coaching staff have managed to turn one of the Championship's leakiest defences into one of the most solid in the last 12 months. At the time of writing our league position shows us as having played 29 games and conceded a mere 28 goals. As a direct result, we are sitting 15 points clear of the bottom three with 17 games left to play, thus giving a huge level of breathing room whilst we try and work out why we're scoring so few goals.

It's fair to say that if we were languishing near the bottom of the table and regularly getting battered by mediocre opposition my views on our lack of potency would be far more pressing, but if you want the gods honest truth, as long as we are keeping clean sheets and scoring the odd goal, my panic level is unlikely to rise above Amber.

For me, it all boils down to the fact that we are now one of those sides who are referred to by others as "hard to beat". We may not be a free flowing, attacking outfit, but we have developed a backbone, we regularly go into away games, set our stall out and don't collapse. We look dangerous on the break with Zaha and Scannell regularly receiving praise from opposing managers, and off the field, thanks to CPFC 2010's resolve, we are no longer looked upon by others as a club who take derisory fees for our most valuable assets.

I guess, what I'm trying to get at, is that occasionally, we all have a tendency to get bogged down in individual gripes without taking the time to look at the bigger picture. I have no doubt that by the time the summer comes around, the squad will undergo a number of changes, the personnel will be shuffled, and the aim will undoubtedly be to bring in players who give us a greater chance of scoring than we currently have.

I can't blame Freedman for the defensive outlook he has adopted this season, he did a great job in keeping us up when he first got the job and will have been desperate to make sure that all the hard work wasn't wasted by a change in ethos this term. The tactic of using two defensive midfielders is the embodiment of caution, but it has had the desired effect thus far.

With Joniesta making a rapid return to fitness following his broken leg, the spark of creativity could well return to our midfield before August, but if it doesn't there will be no harm done. We have a run of games coming up that I'm confident we will pick up points from, and with the mythical 50 point mark only 11 points away we could, hypothetically be all but safe by some point in March. If this is the case it would leave between eight and nine games of completely stress free fixtures to try new things out. Perhaps giving players such as Kwesi Appiah, our newly acquired goal scoring sensation a run in the side, or playing a more attacking formation to see what works and what doesn't, but that's for another day.

The main thing to always keep in the forefront of your mind in the next few years is that we are now supporters of a club who are fully buying into the idea that they are running in a marathon and not a sprint. We are not West Ham, desperately shelling out transfer fees in a mad scramble to return to the money league. We are not Br*ghton, jumping around screaming about what a great club we are and quoting attendances until everyone else has left the room or covered their ears. We are Crystal Palace, a club with a fresh start and a commitment to cultivating our own talent for a long-term goal. Regardless of whether or not we manage to score more than one against Doncaster on Saturday, I'm more than happy to be a fan of a club who know where they are going, no matter how long it takes us to get there.

Until next time.

HLTCO - 12/01/2012

In recent years, the League Cup has come in for some awful stick. Shunned by the "big" clubs who see it as more of a nuisance than a credible competition, neglected by many supporters who would rather their team concentrated on Champions League qualification than winning a trophy, and given as much media attention in the early stages as a press conference to announce David Dickinson is running for Prime Minister, all of which just goes to show how narrow minded the majority of English football has become.

This season was talked about by everyone associated with our club as one of transition and steady growth. With Freedman entering his first full term in charge of the team, he took clear measures to ensure that everyone had their feet planted firmly on the ground. The team was young, the club was still recovering from the damage of administration and the new owners were still getting to grips with the varying requirements attached to running their most expensive hobby successfully.

Five months have now passed since those words of caution first left Dougie's lips, and this season has already been as unpredictable as any to precede it.

It was all going rather steadily until September, when we made our way down to the south coast to visit Brighton. There was no disguising the magnitude of the game for both sets of supporters, and with the opposition so positive about their team’s chances, it was almost routine for us to feel slightly pessimistic about ours. You only had to look at our record against Milwall in the fixtures recent history to give credence to any nagging doubts we may have had. Then something clicked, the lads, who were trailing 1 - 0 with time running out, got a break. Wilf jinked his way across the Brighton box, and let a shot go, it arrowed into the bottom corner and sent the travelling supporters, myself included, into rapturous celebrations.

Cries along the lines of, "This sort of thing just doesn't happen to us!" reverberated around the away end, we were back in the game and playing with no sign of nerves, then, nine minutes later Darren Ambrose bundled a 2nd over the line, thus increasing the feeling of bewilderment. No sooner had we gathered our breath before the night was completed by a certain Mr Murray finishing the Seagulls off in perhaps the most perfect way by netting a 3rd, no one could quite believe it.

It was a result which, although it felt incredibly important at the time, could not have possibly been understood in its full context at a moment so close to the euphoria. What it achieved was greater than a victory over a rival; it reignited a spark and belief amongst our supporters and players that had been gradually kicked out of us over the previous two years, thanks to circumstances beyond our control. The mind-set established following the 10 point deduction was one of unity against all odds as a necessity, what the result at The Amex helped to uncover was the pride and passion that made us feel like we could go anywhere and get the job done, because we had the ability to do so, not just the mental strength.

The months following the Brighton result has shown just how different the spirit within the squad is, whilst always retaining the togetherness and grit that got us through so many hard times when it was called for in the past, we have gone from strength to strength on the field of play. The emergence of Jonny Williams in the centre of our midfield, and the ever improving maturity of players such as Zaha and Scannell, coupled with the defensive solidarity of squad members like McCarthy, Gardner, David Wright and Nathaniel Clyne to name a few, has meant that we do feel confident of doing well wherever we go.

We have since gone on to beat Manchester United at Old Trafford when nobody gave us a hope in hell, with a performance that was far from smash and grab, instead showing everyone watching, that we are now an extremely well drilled defensive unit with the ability to hurt teams with dazzling moments of inspiration, as demonstrated by Darren Ambrose's sublime 35 yard screamer.

We have also gone on to wipe clean the statistic telling us it was 4,843 years since we last won at The Den thanks to Jermaine Easter's first half goal, which proved, thanks to our new found defensive strength, to be all we needed to produce yet another morale boosting victory. It was a result that perhaps, if we were to rewind a year or so, couldn't have happened, simply because of the collective attitude heading into the fixture. Those emotions which would have seen us settle for the prospect of a point before the game no longer existed, being replaced instead, by a feeling that we could go anywhere and do ourselves justice. We may not always get the desired result, but the key thing to remember is that the belief is ever present now.

This brings me on to the game on Tuesday night, a fixture which shifted a huge amount of tickets and had large parts of South London talking about the club again. There were sections of the national media that were sure the game was bound to be a come down for us following our "heroics" at Old Trafford. The facts remained, they said, that Cardiff were the better side. They were sure that the plucky little Palace squad, who by some form of miracle managed to humble United on their own patch, would run out of steam and order would once again be restored, but, as always, we failed to stick to the script.

The game itself could easily be viewed as one which Cardiff dominated. They imposed their style of play on the game for large spells, and often looked very threatening, but, as we all know, those things only tend to matter if you score more goals. As it happened, Cardiff failed to score any, whilst the side that were made outsiders by the bookmakers, despite playing at home, grabbed a goal just before half-time and spent the following 45 minutes defending the lead in much the same manner as they have been all season long.

The five minutes that followed the goal, was yet another moment of release for the supporters. The entire ground, which was rammed full for the first time in years, stood as one and belted out the "We Love You" chant with an enthusiasm not attached, as it has been so often in recent times, to getting the team up for the battle ahead, but simply to express a collective sense of joy and admiration for what Dougie, the team and the owners are doing for our football club.

We as a club, needed a season such as this one, just to rediscover, that supporting a team is not always about wading through endless weeks of disappointing results, and last minute heartbreak, but that occasionally, it is there to enable you to experience moments of sheer ecstasy that aren't tinged with an impending sense of doom. Last night, immediately after Anthony Gardner headed us into a half-time lead was one of those moments. We may go on to lose the tie in the 2nd leg at Cardiff, but the important work has already been done, thanks to the efforts of Dougie, CPFC 2010, the players and the supporters we have a club who can dare to dream once more, and that, when it comes down to it, is what football should always be about.

Until next time.