I have been working on a book about following Palace in the 2009/10 season – administration, ghost goals and the little matter of Hillsborough. The book should be available in April for both ebook and paperback copies.
I’ll be honest and admit that I started writing it purely as a hobby but I have decided to publish it after putting a lot of effort into it. I wanted to try to gauge interest in the book by posting on here.
Follow on twitter and like on facebook for more details over the next couple of months:
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For many, football isn’t about winning or losing. It isn’t even about twenty two players kicking a pig’s bladder about. For many, football is simply a way of life, involving friendship, beer and escaping the wife (or indeed husband for some!)
Despite following the average football displayed by Crystal Palace, James Howland, a trainee primary school teacher and self-diagnosed football addict, makes a vow to ignore work, financial, friendship and family responsibilities to attend every single League and Cup game in the 2009/10 season.
Follow his journey as he travels from Plymouth to Newcastle to Swansea, making light-hearted observations about the events during and around games, people who frequent matches, and the absurdness of situations faced by your every day football supporter – all the while trying to balance his addiction with university and work life. As most years are for most football fans, it’s hardly a season of glory and silverware. Although as long suffering supporters, we’re more comfortable and familiar with pain, misery and a good old moan at the referee. However, during the season, Crystal Palace fall into administration and James is forced to unpick just how much his addiction means to him...
Here is chapter one. Any feedback is welcome.
The Football Addiction
Chapter One – We all follow the Palace
Football doesn’t always make sense. In fact, it rarely does. How can teams in lower leagues on shoe string budgets beat top flight millionaires? How can world class players, like Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, fail so spectacularly to play well together? How can every fan in England support ‘the unluckiest team in the world?’ How can a new ‘worst referee’ be found every single week? How can the sport be immune to the biggest recession in decades and continue to grow in wealth as the population scrounges around for money? But most baffling of all, why on earth do football fans turn up, spending small fortunes, travelling all over the country to obscure towns and cities, despite being served up crap, week after week after week? Total and utter crap in many cases.
In fact, if you counted up all the minutes that a football fan spent talking about how crap their team was, you would probably find that they had enough time to do something fairly productive, such as curing cancer or saving the rainforest (or in some cases, saving their marriage). But why would anyone want to do something productive when they could be having a beer, ranting at referees and be despairing over just how useless their team is?
Despite the lack of logic, football is without doubt the most popular and in my humble opinion, best sport in the world. I’m not doubting the skill involved in other sports, nor the entertainment, but the emotion that you get in football is on a different level to anything else. You can experience anything from joy, pain, excitement, despair, anticipation, anger, surprise, fear, love, contempt, regret – and that’s just in the pub beforehand. No wonder so many fans need a pint by half time to calm their nerves.
Admittedly, supporting Crystal Palace is more about the anger, pain and misery. The whole experience is cold, overpriced and full of disappointment – just like the pies served up in the ground. However, even mundane and average teams such as mine do have their moments. In the previous fifteen years, I have seen promotions, cup semi-finals, last day survivals, play offs, a win at Anfield and most importantly, a 5-0 thrashing of B*ighton. Although this has been evened out with two relegations, losing cup semi-finals, being thrashed in the play offs, getting drenched and slaughtered at Cambridge in the FA Cup, and losing at home to some small south coast side who wear Tesco bags. (that’s Brighton for any non-Palace fans who don’t share our irrational hatred).
However, like thousands of deranged men and woman, I follow my club up and down the country. Whether they are in Plymouth or Newcastle, Swansea or Norwich, come Saturday afternoon (or sometimes a cold Tuesday evening) I’ll be there cheering on my team. Not that it does much good. We’re still crap. But it fills a Saturday afternoon, lets me see my mates, releases my anger and gives me the chance for a good ol’ piss up.
So why Crystal Palace? Why did I choose this particular method of self harming over all the others? I certainly wasn’t from the area. I’d grown up in Ascot so Reading, Brentford or Aldershot would have been more logical addictions geographically. My Dad was born in Bromley and after being taken to Selhurst by his teacher (imagine the press hearing about a story such as this now), was hooked for life. He had then gone on to have three children and as a father, he had failed them. One Liverpool fan, one Manchester United fan and one Tottenham fan. And then came me.
At the tender age of seven, when my football addiction began, my three older brothers each grabbed a limb and pulled me as hard as they could towards their team. Eventually, I came up with a plan. Whoever wins the FA Cup, I’ll support. Come cup final day, United beat Liverpool and that was it, I was a Manchester United supporter. For life right? You can’t ever change your team.
A couple of weeks later, I walked up to my Dad while he was in the garden, mowing the lawn. “Daddy, who’s that football team who you support?” I enquired.
“Crystal Palace, son,” proudly professed my father.
“Well you’ve got four sons and none support that team so I am going to,” I replied, as the perfect son. Since then, the United and Liverpool supporting brothers have been converted to Palace but the Spurs fan is still a lost soul. Although to this day, my Dad claims to have three and a half Crystal Palace supporters. About a year later, he took me to Wembley for my first ever live game to see us get promoted and it’s been downhill ever since.
It was at Wembley that my Crystal Palace addiction started. I remember walking along Wembley Way with my father and brother, experiencing my first banter with an opposition fan as a Sheffield United supporter mocked my scarf. I remember freezing, not knowing how to react to this attack on my club. I remember sitting high in the gods at the world-famous ground as I learnt my first terrace chants of ‘Ole, ole ole ole, Eagles, Eagles’. I remember the players looking tiny – far smaller than they had done on TV. I remember being told that I had to go to the toilet before the game as I wouldn’t be allowed to go until half time otherwise. I remember celebrating as our striker, Bruce Dyer, looked like he had scored, only to realise that the ball had hit the wrong side of the side netting. And most of all, I remember the pure elation as David Hopkin scored the last minute winner for our club. It was the perfect day.
Many fans claim to fall in love with a club for materialistic reasons – their badge, their colours, their location, their song or even a player. But I can’t say that it was our Eagle proudly perched above a ball on our badge. Nor was it the red and blue on the player’s shirt or our song, Glad All Over, which I remember my Dad telling me at Wembley was played before every game at our home ground, Selhurst Park. It certainly wasn’t a love of South London that made me fall for the club either. Although my Grandmother’s decision to live in Bromley and raise her kids there undoubtedly played a logistical part as I can’t imagine a Berkshire born kid would naturally fall for a second rate South London side. And as for falling in love with them for a player, it’s one thing to love a club because of Bobby Moore or George Best, but it would be quite sad to lay the blame of my addiction at the feet of Marc Edworthy.
No, I leant to love all of those things by association with the club. It sounds cheesy but it was a feeling of togetherness and belonging that had drawn me to the club. Approaching the ground, I had felt close to my family – we were in this together. A feeling that returns on the rare occasions that we all attend games together nowadays. However inside the ground, I felt an entirely new feeling of togetherness. I’d only ever met one Palace fan outside of my family before – Jonathan, a boy who played for the same Saturday morning team as me. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure that there were any more of us than that. I was laughed at by schoolmates for not supporting Manchester United or Chelsea. Suddenly, I found myself sat alongside tens of thousands of other Crystal Palace Supporters. I’d found where I belonged – nearly.
On that day, I knew where I belonged but I wasn’t quite part of it yet. There was one thing missing. I didn’t have a red and blue shirt. Everyone else did – although my brother pointed out that the guy behind us didn’t have a shirt at all: just an eagle tattooed across the whole of his back. Despite the scorching hot May sunshine, I kept my Crystal Palace sweatshirt on all day and religiously wrapped my new ‘Eagles at Wembley’ scarf around my neck as I tried to fit in. I couldn’t quite belong but I was going to do my best to try.
After that fateful day, the following years of my childhood saw me decline from a wide-eyed kid at Wembley, taking in the noise, colour and swearing that a first match brings, to an addicted and devoted supporter. I’m not really sure how the addiction happened. It started out as a harmless hobby. In the beginning, I would simply listen to the scores on the radio, when I had nothing else to do, and before I knew it, I was a teenager travelling up and down the country. I was going to every possible game, home and away. I was planning my life around football. Like any addiction, I don’t know where or when I descended into dependence on football, but just like people hooked on drugs or alcohol, I seem unable to function without it.
My story begins as the 2008/09 season was coming to a close. Personally, I was 19 and coming to the end of my second year of university where I was training to be a Primary School Teacher. As for Palace, despite flirting with the play offs over Christmas, it had been a particularly depressing season. Mid table mediocrity. It’s a strange thing, but in some ways I would rather have a relegation dog fight than sit in the middle of the table, filling my weekends with meaningless matches. You look up the table and long for the excitement and thrill of promotions and titles. Yet you also look down at the teams at the bottom. Yes, they would do anything to swap with you. But at least they get the passion that football fans crave for at the end of season big matches and full stadiums.
Crystal Palace, rarely for us, had none of that. Money problems had seen our better players slowly but surely desert us. The list was endless. Ben Watson, Clinton Morrison, Tom Soares, Andy Johnson, Dougie Freedman, Scott Sinclair, Jobi McAnuff, Emerson Boyce and others had all gone. Mainly to the Premiership. The manager seemed fed up, the fans were fed up and the players were dusting off their flip flops, ready for their summer break. It had been months since we’d had a worthwhile game and the season had long since petered out.
Naturally, my first idea was to head to Doncaster for the final away game of the season. I woke up late, missed the coach and that was that. Well, it should have been. But me being me, I was determined to go. I called Robbie, who was in charge of coach travel at Palace, to make some alternative arrangements. I managed to get to my Mum’s place in Egham from Twickenham (where I was at university) and frantically cycled to the A30 roundabout at Junction 13 of the M25 and met the coach.
I got on the coach and sat with my mates. Well, actually just behind them as that was the only space left on the packed coach, and off I went. I said hello to the person next to me. I didn’t recognise him and he had bad BO. Brilliant. I used the age-old match day conversation opener. “What do you reckon today then?”
Well that was it. He was off. Terry (although he told me I could call him ‘Tezza’ if I wished) gave me an in-depth analysis of our season, each player, the manager and he seemed to have a full report on the referee too. After telling me every statistic of the season from our win percentage in the rain to how many goals we had scored from the left hand side of the penalty area, he finally professed that we had a 47.3% chance of winning. I suggested it might be closer to 47.6% but he wasn’t having any of it.
He kept on wittering on about his love of Clint Hill and seemingly personal hatred of Julian Speroni – our goalkeeper and in my opinion, our best player. I bit my lip. Then he moved on to his expectations of us spending millions in the summer. I bit my lip harder – we were having financial difficulties and I expected more players to leave than join. Finally, he moved onto his dislike of some of our fans’ songs and that some weren’t 100% accurate. Apparently, not everyone in Preston lives on benefits as had been sung at one of the previous matches. My lip began to bleed.
After what seemed like a few months, we arrived at a service station and I crept away from him in a fashion not too dissimilar to how opposition strikers seem to manage to sneak away from Palace defenders at Selhurst Park i.e. without much difficulty. I then went to get a fry up with some of my friends. I had to analyse my life. A few of my close mates had stopped going to the away games. Palace were about as successful as a tortoise in a one hundred metre sprint, and about as exciting too. Yet I was still heading to South Yorkshire for what was likely to be a crap match, between two crap teams, with disinterested end-of-season crap support, in a crap town. At least Doncaster’s new ground insured that it wouldn’t be in a crap stadium too. The magic of live football...
Still, it wasn’t all bad – I had a fry up, the highlight of any away trip (or home game in many cases too). If it wasn’t for sausage, bacon, beans and a bit of
fried veg, I don’t think I would have the stomach for watching Palace (or the drinking that inevitably goes with it).
Anyway, back to analysing the worthwhile-ness of continuing with my unquestioning, blind support of Palace all over the country. I still had my season ticket and could do the decent away trips with my friends. Also, some of my closest friends were Brentford fans. Going with them allowed me to get the social side of an away trip, without the heart-ache and disappointment that Palace usually gave me. Then I looked around. One hundred or so Palace fans mulling around Watford Gap services. It was hardly Man United or Arsenal taking over Wembley Way or Milan City Centre with thousands of fans but it still gave me a sense of pride. We all had something in common. We were all here for the same reason. We were all as mad as each other. We all loved Palace. Even ‘Tezza’.
When we got to the ground, a few of us headed around the corner to Lakeside Village, a small shopping centre by the stadium. It seemed to be designed as if it was in the middle of Disneyland rather than a grim town in the north of England. Unfortunately, it was also the only shopping ‘village’ this side of 1900 where it was difficult to find a bloody ATM. Maybe the rumours were true that they don’t use cash ‘oop north’ and still trade farm animals as currency? Just as we were about to give up looking for cash and start hunting for poultry to trade, one of the coach regulars spotted one. Armed with crisp, freshly withdrawn notes, we headed to the Harvester Pub/Restaurant to indulge in some pre-match beer and banter.
After much heated discussion, none of us agreed on the team selection, formation or tactics, so we decided that we would leave that for our manager, Neil Warnock, to choose. Woe betide him if he gets it wrong. Any idiot/football fan knows what he should have done. We got into the ground, listened to the stewards as to where our seats were and then ignored the kind men in yellow and stood at the back. A group of about one hundred of us sang typically rude, irrelevant and sometimes not quite factually true songs (I hope Tezza didn’t hear) about our manager, the opposing fans, Ron Noades (our former chairman), Ron Noades' mother, past players, current players and our un-dying love of all things red’n’blue and South London.
Bizarrely for Palace, we actually played really well. We passed it about, we created chances, we defended well and it was a joy to watch. Somehow, we managed to hit the woodwork three times without scoring. Feeling positive, I walked down to the front, ready to dash out for a ‘cheeky’ pint at half time. Just as I got there, Doncaster scored. Bastards. I waited for the few seconds after the re-start before charging to the beer kiosk and ordered 6 pints of lager (not all for me I hasten to add).
During the second half, I felt much more at home. Palace were crap. The songs dried up (at least Tezza would be pleased on the coach home). The team reverted to long, hopeful and ultimately fruitless passes, while the manager made terrible subs. I knew in the pub that I could do a better job. Doncaster went on to win 2-0. The season was ending in the same depressive manner that it had been played all year.
After the game, I received a phone call from my Dad. He rang me after every game to touch base and see how we’d played. He would usually follow the scores online and fill me in with the ‘experts’ view on the match, while I ignored that and gave him my own ‘expert’ opinion.
I returned to the coach thoroughly pissed off and beginning to sober up. Tezza got on soon after me. “That ref was shit!”.
“I don’t think we can really blame him for the result,” I replied calmly.
“We should have had two penalties in the first half!” he snorted back, while spitting out some crumbs from a pork pie he was munching on.
I considered his view, briefly, and then decided that rather than pointing out that the first claim was a clear dive that had left our other players laughing and the second appeal was when our player had handled in their box, I would agree. He then blurted out “And why were our bloody fans singing that they’re a small team in Sheffield. Don’t they know that Doncaster is 22.3 miles from Sheffield?”
I pretended to be asleep. I had a long and uncomfortable journey, being squashed against the window.
A few of us headed back to Thornton Heath for a couple more pints and discussed the “highlights” of the season. It was difficult. However, what was even more difficult was deciding how to spend Saturdays over the summer. No football? What on earth would we do? We could waste our weekends by drinking all day in London, but without a bit of shit football to discuss in the middle of it, it just wouldn’t be the same. It was during this discussion, and after a fair amount of alcohol, that I made an important pledge. A vow. I was going to do what I had always wanted to do, but had so far eluded me by the odd game. I, James Howland, was going to go to every Crystal Palace league and cup game, home and away, during the 2009/2010 season, and nothing or no-one was going to stop me.
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