It is the strangest feeling as a Palace fan to be at this stage of the season with nothing to play for.
I struggle to think of many years when final games have been meaningless. Of course it was a bit like this last year, but we managed to put that to one side by treating the Liverpool game as a cup final.
Most years, we seem to be in the mix either for the Championship play-offs or in a relegation dogfight.
We don’t do dull.
And we should give credit to the players that for the last two games, there has definitely been effort in games against top four sides. There has not been a sense in those games that the players are on the beach.
Since the win at Sunderland, and the adulation of Yannick Bolasie after his hat-trick, the general media coverage of Palace has been very limited, and in a way that is completely understandable. The relegation battle has been really interesting, as has the discussion on Nigel Pearson’s potential descent into madness, while there will always be coverage of the top sides, not matter how early the winners are decided.
Does this lack of coverage matter?
Well, I think it does.
The next step for the club is to establish ourselves as a strong mid-table club, a team that is not necessarily big enough to challenge for the top four slots, but equally one that is rarely thought of as a relegation candidate.
The Premier League team that most readily fits that description at the moment is Stoke City. Aside from a few Charlie Adam wonder-strikes, Stoke have largely been ignored in football news reporting for most of this season.
The route to an end of season mid-table position can take several forms. Looking at this year, Palace, Everton and West Bromwich Albion have got there after long flirtations with relegation, (and after my January prediction that they would sort themselves out!). West Ham United have gone the other way, starting very well, before dropping slowly to mid-table (and I got that one right too – my tipping fell apart after that!).
Meanwhile, Stoke and Swansea City have been consistently positioned between 8th and 12th, and have barely been noticed.
Perhaps that is due to the lack of charisma shown by their managers. Mark Hughes looks like he is about to moan for hours about a marginal refereeing decision even when Stoke have won 3-0. Garry Monk suffers in the cockney charm stakes against Tim Sherwood and our own Super Al, even though he has done a quietly impressive job so far.
Perhaps that is due to geography. South Wales and the Potteries are not sexy places. I worry that Croydon falls into the same category.
(Well I know Croydon falls into that category. But I do not want new players to find that out until after they have signed their contracts!)
The external view of the club is important, because as a club on the rise, we want to attract players to take us to the next level. And I do mean ‘players’ plural. The Attilio Lombardo signing was wonderful, because it meant we got to see one of the finest players in the world. But he was too good for everyone else, and the club did not have the foundations then to support the footballing ambitions of a player like him.
We do have those foundations now.
Arguably, so do Stoke and Swansea. Yet they struggle to attract players. They have both signed European flair players in recent seasons – Michu at Swansea and Bojan at Stoke. In these cases, both signings looked good in the short term – both players looked really good in their games at Selhurst Park, but Michu became unsettled, and Bojan injured, and they have not been able to take their teams to the next level – competing for (or hilariously avoiding) Europa League places alongside Liverpool, Tottenham and Southampton.
We need more than the fleeting flair player to take us forward. And we need to be seen as a club more upwardly mobile and interesting than Stoke or Swansea.
The signings that the club look to make over the next few weeks will be a test of whether we are destined for greater things, or whether we may have to settle for being the ‘Stoke of the South’.
