August 30 2011

Dougie Freedman

Palace met the best team they have encountered so far this season. Jamesey went home grateful for a 1-1 result.

As we all know, winning streaks all come to an end sooner or later but we can have few complaints about snatching a point against Blackpool at Selhurst (Aug 27).

A crowd of 14,776 was bolstered by hundreds of free tickets generously given by the club to victims of the dreadful rioting in Croydon a few weeks ago.

Dougie Freedman, in his match programme notes, paid tribute to Tangerines boss, Ian Holloway, who had been an inspiration to our manager in his early days at Queens Park Rangers. "He's very charismatic and entertaining," wrote Dougie. Hear, hear, to that say I, and not "here, here" as many HOL message board posters seem to imagine.

Judging by the first half, he is still very much an inspiration to his side, even after relegation from the Pilesomoulah League last May.

The Eagles were simply outplayed, outmanoeuvred and out-everything elsed in the early stages and it was only - yet again - a couple of world class saves by Julian Speroni that stopped Blackpool being three up, rather than a single Alex Baptiste goal, at the half-time whistle.

I don't like singling out individual players but whatever has happened to the Darren Ambrose that we fondly remember? Once, the jewel in our crown, the past few months have seen a rapid decline from ordinariness to downright liability, with miscued passes gifted to the opposition and abysmal corners and free kicks.

We started the second half with a little more spirit and in due course some good substitutions - Wilfried Zaha, Glenn Murray and Owen Garvan - certainly brightened up the Eagles' play.

Having penned an article dealing with footballers' hair styles recently, I found Zaha's new coiffure (or lack of it) quite beguiling. Wilf was totally shaven, apart from a band of hair on one side of his bonce. Never seen anything quite like that before.

A Glenn Murray strike evened up the score in the 79th minute but there was plenty of excitement and narrow misses from both teams to make the second period a far more watchable experience for the red-and-blue element.

So, due to an international weekend, we have no more games until Leeds away on Sept 10. Palace are 6th, in the second division table after Sunday's West Ham win, so there's nothing to get downhearted about and quite a lot to look forward to.

And, I'll be blowed, we were the featured match on the Football League Show at 11.50pm on BBC1. I delayed my bedtime cocoa to watch that and even the old caravan salesman Steve Claridge had nothing too bad to say about us. Mind you, we looked just as bad in most of the first half as we had done earlier in the day.

Incidentally it was a touching gesture for CPFC 2010 director Steve Browett to welcome Croydon's Reeves family onto the pitch at half-time.

The family's furniture shop was, of course, burnt down in the rioting and Steve presented them with a Palace shirt numbered 144 - the number of years the business had been running before destructive scum destroyed a symbol of the old Croydon.

Email Jamesey with your comments to jevans3704@aol.com

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