Try being a Palace fan…

The word ‘crisis’ is perhaps the most impulsive and over-used term in football. If you believed everything you read in the papers, you might have thought that Arsenal were nailed on for relegation before the season had even started.

Manchester United are the latest team to be brandished a club in crisis, having taken a measly twenty points from their first eleven games, while boasting two of the best strikers in the world and sitting just one point off the Champions League places. As you can probably tell, my sympathy levels for the newly formed #MoyesOut brigade aren’t exactly through the roof.

If you’re looking for a real problem team in football, try being a Crystal Palace fan for a week. Unfortunately for me, the poisoned chalice of supporting a stripy kitted team in a small corner of South London was inherited at an early age. In fact, I remember walking to my first game: an unassuming five year old, innocently believing I was heading towards the bright lights of Old Trafford, only to have the harrowing realisation that I had been tricked into watching Palace play Sheffield United. Of course, we lost that game 1-0, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

Supporters of a small club will tell you that the countless lows your team forces you to endure make the occasional highs all the more immense. Indeed, Palace’s play-off win at Wembley back in May felt a lot like how I imagine getting 100 retweets would feel.

Since then, however, we’ve lost our best player to Manchester United’s reserves, we sit bottom of the Premiership and I keep having the same nightmare about the dreadful things that Sergio Aguero will do to Damien Delaney when we play Manchester City. Oh, and our situation is looking so precarious that no one wants to be our manager.

A true loss to the Premier League: Even the legendary Ian Holloway couldn’t drag the Eagles to safety

As daunting as it might seem for Palace at the moment, this is a far cry from flirting with Championship relegation, switching between five different managers and almost going out of business (all of which have happened at the club in the last four years). However, part of me can’t stop asking why Super Kevin Phillips didn’t just miss that penalty at Wembley, the beautiful old genius…

My expectations for the season have ranged from the optimistic heights of avoiding relegation to praying for us to surpass Derby County’s all time record low tally of eleven points. In fact, I have tried to compensate for Palace’s poor form by placing a bet on the opposition every weekend and, if things carry on as they are, I’ll be eating breakfast at Mitchells and dinner at The Adamson for the remainder of the season!

If you were to ask me, however, if I would swap the wooden seats of Selhurst Park for the glory and glamour of a club like Chelsea, the answer would be a resounding no. I mean, only Palace would give you the opportunity to say ‘I was there’ when Marouane Chamakh scored on a cold Saturday afternoon in Stoke. We are, after all, only eleven games into the season, and there is plenty of time left for the Eagles to mount a late challenge for the Champions League places and, if that fails, I’ll happily settle for 17th place in May.

Crisis? At Palace? What crisis?

Images courtesy of skysports and football365