After what has seemed like an awfully long drawn out process. Palace have a new management team.
Hot, or not so hot on the heels of the appointment of Iain Moody in a director capacity Steve Parish announced that Tony Pulis would take over the team with immediate effect.
If you read the Sky Sports article on Pulis before he left Stoke City it seems like he got a raw deal from the owners at the time and also from a lot of fans since being linked with the Palace job.
Perhaps he is just the right man for the job seeing as he has a keen eye firmly focused on such teams that do have successful youth policies. Two European clubs that he visited, Athletic Bilbao and Bayer Leverkusen, gave him inspiration on how to make the most of a youth academy. He did not get that chance to put anything in place before it mutually decided his time at the Britannia had run it’s course.
Step forward Steve Parish. One of the owners of a club that have a proud tradition of youth players coming through the ranks. A certainly the one thing that was held onto in the last administration even though it was suggested that it should have been sold. Maybe, just maybe, Pulis will have a point to prove to everyone.
The biggest questions that arise by his appointment is the wage demands, agreed budget for the January transfer window, style of football and lack of youth policy. He does bring with him a knowledge of teams that fight tooth and nail for a result even if that is physical and ‘brutal’. But that along with the direct style of play that fans of Palace are used to. There were not a lot of complaints in the late eighties and early nineties when Steve Coppell’s Palace sides were doing very similar.
Welshman Pulis does have something else though. Experience. His football career begain in the youth ranks at Newport until he move on to the youth set up at Bristol Rovers. He made his senior debut for them in 1975. He moved to Hong Kong in 1981 and played a handful of games for Happy Valley before returning for another stint with Bristol Rovers. In a career of over 300 appearances he later went on to play for Newport County, Bournemouth and Gillingham before returning to Bournemouth to finish his career.
His managerial career began where his playing career ended, Bournemouth. He went on to manage Gillingham, Bristol City, Portsmouth Stoke City and Plymouth Argyle before returning to Stoke City in arguably his most successful spell. To date he has been in charge of almost 900 games of which around 327 wins, 269 draws and 298 losses with a win ratio of 36.58%.
It is a new chapter at Palace. Us fans enjoy our team fighting for the cause. That’s just what we are likely to see even if it back to an old style of play. But as many will recal fondly, that style brought us our most successful period in our history.
Article written by Jay Crame.
