December 10 2012

Tangerine time at Selhurst Park

Another dramatic day as our new manager's old outfit visited Selhurst. Jamesey gives his impressions.

Twas a game of three emotions really - frustration, elation and desolation, when Blackpool came to town (Dec 8).

Only five weeks after changing his colours from tangerine to red and blue, Ian Holloway's ex-employers carved out a well deserved 2-2 draw, but the scoreline doesn't tell the whole story.

A surprisingly scant gate of just under 16,000 turned out for what had looked like a very appealing fixture, given Palace's promotion-chasing credentials at present.

For a team within a whisker of Championship top spot, the Eagles were woeful in the first period - sloppy passing, giving the ball away and looking distinctly second best to an impressive Seasiders team.

Frankly, at the break we were extremely lucky to be only 0-1 down but the appearance on the pitch of one of our celebrity fans, Bill Nighy cheered your columnist up somewhat.

I had known that Bill, originally a local lad from the Croydon area, was a Palace supporter but had never before actually seen him in the stadium.

Bill's successful acting career has covered a wide-ranging number of parts, from his superb portrayal of a newspaper editor in the TV series, "State of Play", for which he won a hatful of awards to the squid-faced Davy Jones in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies for which he also received gongs galore.

Anyhow whatever alchemy was wreaked at half-time (did Ollie give the ultimate gee-up or did Bill don his squid mask and frighten the team into upping their game?) , the Eagles were a different proposition after the break.

Playing the high-quality football to which we have become accustomed in recent times, the lads tore into the Seasiders and it wasn't long before Owen Garvan and Glenn Murray had put Palace 2-1 up and looking like improving on that.

Wilfried Zaha appears to have gone backwards since he was being hyped up as the new wunderkind of English football and is showing some of his old bad habits like keeping the ball when he should pass and trying to beat too many defenders.

Or it could be that the amount of attention Wilf gets from opposition defenders creates more space for our other wing talent, Yannick Bolasie. The latter had an absolutely outstanding game and made one appreciate how lucky we were to get our hands on him.

The Eagles are rarely a soft touch nowadays but giving away a goal to Blackpool in the 89th minute was a real gut-wrencher and the fixture was drawn.

Flicking through the match programme, I was surprised to see that the editors had selected Jimmy Armfield as Blackpool club legend in preference to a man who, to me, stands head and shoulders above all other legend pretenders in any club - Sir Stanley Matthews.

He rarely is mentioned when football enthusiasts chat about the great players of the past - Maradona, Pele, Cruyff and the others. Maybe it is because his style of player went out of fashion in the 1960s and out-and-out, tricky, dribbling wingers were left on the shelf.

Stan played for Blackpool for 14 years and was still playing top-level football for Stoke at 50-years-old, among too many other achievements to mention here. Now there's a real legend.

To conclude on a depressing note, it seems that the lunacy disease is spreading amongst home supporters.

Even after all the hoo-hah about breakages and requests from our owners not to stand on seats after the Brighton match, a bunch of morons around the middle of Block W of the Arfur decided to ignore all common sense.

They had already been standing up for long periods of the Blackpoool game but fortunately there were spare seats elsewhere for non-morons who wished simply to watch the match sitting down.

After they decided to stand on their seats, a senior steward merely reprimanded them whereas the best course of action for the game of football in general would have been to throw them out of the ground for that game and for ever.

Email Jamesey with your comments to jevans3704@aol.com

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