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.
