It May Never Get Better Than This

Living in Dreamland

Occasionally at Wordsmith, I write about football. Almost inevitably when I do, I write about Crystal Palace. Excuse me for the partisanship, but even if you have no great interest or knowledge of the sport, let alone my team, I hope you will enjoy the sentiments. Hey, if Nick Hornby can get away with it on his Substack… I also hope you get something from the following relevant to your own life, and allow that it makes a change to read something totally positive in 2025.

Liverpool have been the opponents for some of Crystal Palace’s most cherished memories over the last 35 years. Until May 17 of this year, when Palace won their first ever major trophy (the FA Cup Final, at Wembley, against Manchester City), it was the 4-3 thriller FA Cup semi-final victory over Liverpool in 1990 on neutral territory that was heralded as the Eagles’ greatest single victory and most memorable match. It came at the end of a season that had seen us lose 9-0 to Liverpool, the eventual League champions that year, only months earlier, and in the process it secured us our first ever FA Cup Final appearance (which of course, we lost, but that’s a whole other saga I wrote about for the New York Press back in the day and reposted on the morning of May 17, see below).

As for unforgettable nights at Selhurst Park, the Crystal Palace home ground, nothing could rival “Crystanbul” – a Monday night in May 2014 whereby Liverpool’s 3-0 lead with 11 minutes left on the clock looked certain to guarantee them their first League title since 1990, only for Palace to claw all three goals back and deny them that opportunity, the crowd sensing the comeback and lifting the players to that third goal.

And though it pales next to Palace’s FA Cup Final victory this past May, our second piece of silverware, won on August 10 of this year, back at Wembley in the Community Shield - against a Liverpool side that had run rampant in winning the Premier League last year¹ - proved an uncommonly exciting pre-season showcase that ended 2-2 in normal time and which Palace won fairly and squarely on penalties.

However, I have a feeling that this past Saturday’s 2-1 win at home to Liverpool in the Premier League, ending our opponents’ 100% record across their seven matches since that Community Shield game, is possibly the most important for Crystal Palace in the long run. Decided by an excruciating late goal – in added time upon added time – scored by an unlikely hero, substitute Eddie Nketiah, it saw Crystal Palace end the weekend in third place in the English Premier League, behind only Liverpool and Arsenal, the teams who occupied those same positions at the end of the 24-25 season. It also leaves Crystal Palace as the only undefeated side in the Premier League with, alongside Arsenal, the stingiest defence – only three goals conceded across six matches.

The manner in which Palace won this match was as important as the result. Liverpool were played off the park in a first half that Palace loyalist Dan Cook, co-host of the officially non-partisan podcast Football Between the Lines, cited as the best 45 minutes he has seen Palace play in 25 years of following the club, and while I have well over twice that amount on the clock, I don’t know I would disagree. But for the woodwork and the quality of their rightly revered keeper, Allison, Liverpool could easily have gone in for that half-time break 4-0 down rather than merely 1-0. Liverpool proved their mettle – and hinted at justifying the exorbitant cost of their squad²- with an equalizer three minutes from the conclusion of normal time, and the minute-by-minute BBC commentator gushed how this kind of late-game persistence “is the mark of champions.” A Palace of almost any other era would have agreed, closed ranks and settled for a draw. But not this team, who pushed forward relentlessly and subsequently took the three points with virtually the last kick of the game. The true mark of champions.

Yet the late win was not necessary for Palace to achieve something arguably more monumental than beating the best club in England twice in a few weeks, more monumental than a temporary third place position: it equaled the club record of eighteen matches unbeaten across all competitions.

For a comparative point of reference, the previous record was established in 1969, in the old Second Division, as the boys who then wore claret and blue went on a late-season splurge that saw them promoted to the top flight for the first time in history, a run that quickly ended once Palace found their place among the big boys of that period – which is to say, among the bottom places, fighting against relegation for four years until gravity finally sucked them back down.

This current undefeated run, on the other hand, has been established against some of the best teams in Europe, names my international readers will likely recognize: Liverpool three times, Manchester City twice; Aston Villa twice; Tottenham Hotspur, the Europa Cup winners this past season; and Chelsea, who won the Europa Conference League and the inaugural FIFA Club World Cup in the few weeks before we played them.

For those, like me, who go back fifty years or more dedicating ourselves to an underdog sports club, these are not just the best of times. This is dream world, an almost surreal experience inside a parallel universe. I came of age in those early 1970s when we were languishing in the second and third divisions. Among the grounds I recall traveling to for away games were such minor clubs (no offence intended) as Walsall, Port Vale, Lincoln, Aldershot, Gillingham, Bristol Rovers, Peterborough, Swindon, Shrewsbury and Wrexham, and almost every one of them except the last conjure up memories of miserable defeats or mediocrity. With the exception of Liverpool’s Anfield for an FA Cup Match in 77 (the scariest away experience of my life), and Sunderland’s Roker Park and Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge during a lengthy cup run the previous year (also the scariest away experiences of my life), I don’t recall seeing Palace at any “major” ground during those years.

Yet this summer, I had the pleasure of watching Palace at the biggest ground in the country – the national, Wembley Stadium – twice, coming out winners of silverware both times. What with the FA Cup Semi Finals being held there as well, Palace has played Wembley more than any other team this year (if not as often as Oasis), and won on each occasion. I consider May 17 the best day of my life, bar none.

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I could leave the conversation there and go back to pinching myself. But perhaps the greatest thing about the elevation of our humble club, the one whose ground is infamously “impossible to get to,” a reflection upon our unfashionable surroundings in the deepest bowels of South London, where it stretches into Croydon, our old-fashioned “stadium” desperately in need of an upgrade and yet which can produce a noise when packed to 25,000 capacity unlike any other in England… is the fact we remain a club rooted in community.

Yes, modern football is inherently corrupted by the sums of money that fly around like it’s just a game of Monopoly, and our club has no choice but to pay modern-day salaries that render reserve players multi-millionaires. But we are not tainted by middle-eastern regime money, Russian oligarch laundering, nor Asian royal family glory-hunting, and the club embraces community values compassion and caring, maintaining a true esprit de corps (a phrase I use deliberately this week) that has consciously sought to avoid marquee signings whose ego and/or prima donna status could upset that team spirit.

I am aware that the majority of the club’s shares are owned by American sports investors (one of them unfortunately a Trump crony), but it is the club chairman Steve Parish, a life-long fan, who has final say on any decision. Parish was part of a consortium along with fellow hardcore fans (and successful businessmen) Stephen Browett, Martin Long and Jeremy Hosking, that stepped up somewhat reluctantly in 2010 to save the club when it had been hours away from going out of business.

Their initial five-year plan for growth went awry when Palace were promoted back to the Premier League as soon as in 2013, a season later documented in a wonderful Amazon series called When Eagles Dare which I heartily recommend to anyone who can hack regular hours following the FX docuseries Welcome To Wrexham, or would like to see more of the ground at which Ted Lasso was filmed. Taking on responsibilities as day-to-day chairman, Parish was forced to learn the cut-throat high stakes machinations of the Premiership on the job, and despite the occasional error of judgement, which he has generally had the decency to admit to, his stewardship has nonetheless brought us to our current heady status. Other clubs – well, other clubs’ fans - are envious.

However, circumstance and fate always plays a part in good fortune. In February of last year, Oliver Glasner, an Austrian who had been noted for his managerial successes in Germany, agreed to fast track his much-rumoured appointment to succeed Palace’s septuagenarian coach Roy Hodgson in the summer after Hodgson, under enormous pressure during a mistaken return to the club he had followed as a child, collapsed on the training ground and was given cover to resign. Under Glasner, the turnaround was almost immediate, and Palace ended that season on fire. In particular, we saw the likes of Jean-Phillipe Mateta, a player so out of favor with Roy Hodgson that many Palace fans would have been happy to see him sold, become a veritable goal machine, and something of a talisman with it, his joie de vivre proving positively contagious.

We also saw Ebereche Eze finally step up to his presumed role as the great homeboy Wilf Zaha’s successor, and though Eze was sold just last month to his own boyhood club Arsenal, we have watched Glasner’s preferred signings gel with those he inherited into a squad and a team that has proved it can take on anyone. This team is a veritable United Nations, with players from Japan, Colombia, Senegal, Spain, the USA, Croatia, and France, as well as three England internationals, one of whom came through the Palace Academy, but there is no sign of the farce under a previous ownership that saw Palace require three translators in the dressing room. This team speaks with one tongue.

I do not expect these heady times to last, which is why I write about them now, so that my feelings and observations can be dated, published and postmarked for posterity. The record-equaling unbeaten run will end, and it may end within hours of publishing this article, as Palace today (October 2) face their first match in the Europa Conference League proper this Thursday, away to a Dynamo Kiev forced by Putin’s invasion of their homeland to play in Poland but still a threat to any visitors.

And only a brave man would place money on Palace being in the top three at the end of a season, at which time, regardless, Glasner’s contract will expire, as will that of our captain Marc Guehi; assuming the latter does not leave in the January transfer window, at a point we can still secure a fee for him, it is almost inevitable we will start the 26-27 season without both these leaders, given that they can surely take their pick of lucrative contracts at the very biggest clubs in the world.

But that is in the future. And the great thing about the future is that it is unwritten. Who would be a sports fan otherwise?

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If you would sooner have some music with your football, I have a book for you. My Dear Boys bandmate Tony Page has just published Anoraks For Goalposts, the third in a series of books about obscure 45s that was preceded by Anoraky In The UK Volumes 1 and 2. In the new edition, Pagey gathers up information on almost every football club song, either official or unofficial, he was able to get his hands on via vinyl, cassette or CD. Sample pages on Hartlepool and Heart of Midlothian shown below to produce a cross between a fanzine and a bumper Record Collector special. I am hoping I can write further about this down the line, featuring videos of some of the songs Pagey most highly recommends. In the meantime, you can get the book via spiffinggoodeggs5@gmail.com using paypal. Price including postage UK =£21.70 Europe £29.50 US /ROW £31.50

1. The Community Shield, formerly the Charity Shield, is an annual one-off held between the League winners and the FA Cup Winners on the eve of the following season. Having never won a trophy before May, it is self-evident that this was Palace’s first appearance in the Shield.

2. Liverpool, despite running away the League title last year, spent £450 million on purchasing just four players this summer. This is about twice what it cost Crystal Palace to assemble their entire squad.