I’ve got a good feeling about tomorrow’s game. They’ve had a better season than we have, but we’re in flying form. Still, it’s tough to play at home first because you know that if you let a goal in you’ve given yourselves twice as much work to do.
Fingers crossed. I think we’ll win 2-1.
Boris’s victory, maddening and saddening though it is, failed to mar an otherwise wildly successful weekend. I’ve never been to a Palace game where we won by anything like as huge a margin. Burnley had nothing to play for, but the other side’s indifference hasn’t stopped us failing to set the game on fire in the past, and the team played really smart and well-put-together football. Particularly pleasing was the fact that every goal was scored by someone different. Full match write-up here.
Even more pleasing was our 5th-place finish, which sees us meet Bristol City in the playoffs. We managed to get tickets for the home leg, which takes place this Saturday. Two games in a week! I am a genuine bona-fide fairweather fan. Good.
It was weird, though: I can’t remember having been to a game where we’ve led by more than one goal in the final minutes. Even when we’re winning I’m used to spending that last quarter of an hour in a state of arm-chewing tension, but you can’t even make a pretence of that when you’re five goals ahead. I felt strangely cheated.
In other news, Ronnie won the snooker and tfl.gov.uk won the People’s Choice for Government website award in the webbys. And it was a three-day weekend. I know I should be more upset about Ken – and I am, really I am – but I can’t seem to shift this good mood. It’s probably not worth fighting it, is it?
Last night’s game was lots of fun, despite it not ending with the result I was hoping for. The upside of Chelsea winning is that I can support Man U in the final: if Liverpool had got through I’d have been supporting them and heading for almost certain heartbreak. It’s also kind of cool that the two teams who are (realistically) fighting for the Premiership will now also meet in the Champions’ League final. I haven’t been so interested in the English Premiership in years. Well, since 15 May 2005.
Anyway, none of that is nearly as exciting as the culmination of the Championship campaign this weekend. Palace are still in sixth, and can be overtaken by any or all of Wolves, Ipswich Town or Sheffield Utd if we fail to beat Burnley at home on Sunday. Startlingly, tickets for this game have nearly sold out (according to the club’s website, at least), so me and my fellow fairweather matchgoers may have to take the unlikely step of booking in advance.
I’m also going to have to take a radio for listening to the other results, and a piece of paper and a pencil for working out what they all mean. Wish me luck.
Good news: apparently Simon Jordan has secured the lease on Selhurst Park for another 25 years.
Bad news: he still wants to move the club elsewhere, according to this article from the BBC:
“I’d like to see Palace move away from Selhurst Park, I’d like to stay in the Borough and I’d like us to move to a stadium which is more befitting of the ambitions we have for the club.”
In which “Borough”, I wonder? I guess he means Croydon, since that’s where they are now. I’d like to see them move back to Crystal Palace proper, although there’s not an obvious spot, unless they pull down the athletics stadium and start again.
I’d also like to see fewer random capitalisations, beginning with that “B”.
I’ve a treat lined up after work today: I’m going to see my genius hairdresser (I’m still not linking to her). I wasn’t sure how long it was since I’d last been, but I see I last posted about her on February 22, almost exactly eight weeks ago. Having short hair is very labour-intensive – when it was long I would have a haircut about once a year, and I’d usually do it myself.
The odd thing is that as soon as I make an appointment to have it cut because it looks raggedy and awful, it starts to look fine, and I have second thoughts. Logically, I think this means I should make a hairdresser’s appointment every day, but never go, thus guaranteeing a lifetime of good hair days.
And the second rtbc is that as I was travelling back from lunch in the lift, two men had a conversation about Palace’s promotion prospects, and they agreed that they were good. I’m not sure I agree, but it was good to hear nonetheless, and all the more welcome for being unexpected. People, generally, are not nice about CPFC.
Stoke 1 – 2 Palace
We weren’t at home after all, so I watched it at the Half Moon, which I have long thought was a scrubby dive of a place, but which is actually fine for watching football in, and does really good pizzas, and has a Monday night “2 pizzas and a bottle of wine for £20” deal. I shall return.
Anyway, it was a really good game, with some actual playmaking by both sides. There was a 20-minute period early in the second half where they hammered us relentlessly and it looked like they were going to score, but the luck didn’t run their way and they didn’t manage it until the 85th minute, by which time it was too late for them to claw anything else back. I don’t know who Sky’s Man of the Match was, but mine was our keeper Julián Speroni, who rescued us on various occasions when nobody else managed to get to the ball. I’ve just googled him to check how to spell his name, and it turns out he’s Argentinian. I always thought he was Yugoslavian, even though none of his name sounds Yugoslavian, and I’m not even sure there’s still a country called Yugoslavia. Then I wondered if I was confusing him with Gábor Király, but he’s Hungarian, so now I have no idea what I was thinking.
But we’re back in the playoff spots, and it looks like we’ll have another nail-biting end to the season, one way or another. Hurray!
We’re at home to Stoke tonight. Stoke are the kind of team we should definitely beat, only unaccountably they’re in second place and look as likely as anyone to win automatic promotion. I don’t understand football. Anyway, a win tonight would see us in sixth (from tenth), so fingers crossed for that.
I’m feeling generally cheery about football today, after seeing Portsmouth and Cardiff win their respective semi-finals this weekend. Radio 5 had a caller on who had been at Wembley the last time Cardiff won the cup, in 1927. He was ninety and blind, and said that the R5 commentary was so good he felt as though he’d been there. The boorish phone-in host – who I’m told is called “Spoony”, which probably tells me as much as I need to know about him – was charmlessly dismissive, but it was a good story all the same. I was also cheered and heartened by the Southampton fan who called in to wish Portsmouth luck in the final (really!) and the Man U supporter who said that Middlesbrough had played “as though it was the Champions’ League final” in their 2-2 draw. He went on to be churlish about Chelsea, just to maintain the reputation, rather than smear it by being accidentally nice for a whole minute.
We’ve got five games to play, all but one of them against sides who are either above us in the table or just a point or two below. With five to play, it’s a bit early for me to don my maths hat and start working out all the possible permutations, but at this stage, and in ninth spot (but only two points behind a play-off position), I think our chances are looking quite low.
However, this will all get much more exciting when it gets down to one or two games to go and I can pore over the paper and work out every possible outcome and – much less accurately – the likelihood of each. Working out out what might happen is one of my favourite parts of the season.
I am suddenly worried that this makes me a very dull person.
We’re at home to Blackpool tomorrow, following a run of six games without a loss. I had half-made a plan to go, but of my two principal matchgoing buddies one is on holiday and the other would rather go to the pub, and if the weather stays like this I may join him. I will take a small radio with me and listen to the results from there.
Last Saturday’s last-minute equaliser against Sheffield Wednesday was cause for celebration, even though it was a match we should have won. But a draw in which you were losing for most of the game is a good result, just as a draw in which you were winning for most of it is a bad one. And we’re still in with a play-off chance, for now.
…after that appalling loss to Wolves at the weekend. But the weekend’s cheering footballing moment was Spurs beating Chelsea in the league cup final yesterday. I sort of hate them both, but I’ve hated Chelsea longer and for more noble reasons.
Glad All Over 