It has been a strange week, with two contrasting performances.
Between the two games, there was a sense of nervousness about how Alan Pardew and Yohan Cabaye would respond to the inevitable stick they would get from the away support.
There was also the ongoing nice touch on the supporter friendly club website in wishing former players well on their birthdays. Last Thursday we were invited to pass on our good wishes to Tommy Black (36) and Trevor Aylott (58).
The sight of Mr Aylott in classic eighties footballer pose of shoulder length curly hair brought a smile to my face. Aylott played in the early eighties, when Palace had moved on from being the team of the eighties to being a very ordinary side, seemingly dependent on Chelsea cast-offs at a time when Chelsea were nothing special.
Aylott went on, like all Chelsea cast-offs of that era, to become a cabbie.
Before they undertook ‘the knowledge’, Palace signed a number of Chelsea players, including Tommy Langley, Gary Locke, Micky Droy (on loan), but Aylott and Brian Bason were arguably a low point.
That was certainly the argument of my father, who disliked the pair of them intensely.
As I noted before this was not the finest period in the club’s history and Aylott and Bason were not destined to be the saviours of the club.
It is a strange phenomenon for fans to actively dislike one of their own players but it happens, especially when a team is struggling. And by dislike I mean a sustained dislike, not just an instant social media reaction to one or two bad performances.
I have gone back through my time as a Palace fan to look for some themes about what has made the crowd take a dislike to a particular player.
And I got a bit carried away. The more I thought about it, the more Palace players I thought of that never hit it off with the fans, so this is going to be two parter.
And even then I know there will be lots of players I have forgotten about!
To start with I will run through a couple more players my father took a dislike to, because that was my introduction to the curious phenomenon of not liking your own.
I remember two players from the late Malcolm Allison / early Terry Venables era – the goalkeeper, affectionately known as ‘Handbags’ Hammond and ‘Fatty Four’ Phil Holder. Dad did not get over the sale of John Jackson for about twenty years. It took about four seasons for Nigel Martyn to get the highest praise – ‘well he does not make too many howlers, but he never comes out for corners’.
If you look up Phil Holder and Crystal Palace on the internet now, you will see that he scored the only goal in the epic FA Cup replay against Brighton that led to the rivalry the two clubs now have. The man deserves a statue!
Dad’s other irrational scapegoat was Paul Hinshelwood – the right back in the Palace Team of the Century – who was nicknamed ‘Doris’, because ‘he plays like an old woman’.
Pretty harsh in retrospect and at the time – the gentleman on the end of the row got very upset every time ‘Doris’ got picked on.
A more obvious cause of unpopularity might be for a player to be signed from a rival club.
But if we look down the A23 at our most high profile signings Glenn Murray and for us oldies Gary O’Reilly, their signings seemed to go down well.
That is not the case with some of our lesser rivals though. Many of you will not remember the signing of Steve Ketteridge from Wimbledon in the mid eighties to play alongside Geoff Thomas. Ketteridge had been brilliant in one of the most humiliating days in Palace’s history – the 5-0 home defeat to the Dons in February 1985.
We signed him soon after and never saw the same form again – a phenomenon my dad calls the ‘Alex Dyer syndrome’.
Meanwhile Wimbledon replaced Ketteridge with a thug from North London non-League football called Jones …
More recently we have had a couple of disappointing signings from our friends at the Den. Tony Craig had a brief career as Palace’s left back after signing from Millwall and not a bad career back at Millwall, then Brentford and now Millwall again after failing to pull up any trees at Selhurst.
Andy Roberts was an England under 21 international we signed as a defensive midfield replacement for Gareth Southgate when Southgate left for Aston Villa. He was a decent enough player but not the star we were hoping for.
That is where I will pause but come back next time because there are maybe more candidates we need to consider …
