Last week I looked at the Palace team from the 1971/72, the first time that Palace played a third season in the top tier. Apologies for a couple of factual inaccuracies, which have now been corrected!
We return to 1971/72 to see how the season ended.
The season was unbelievably tight at the top with Arsenal, Derby County, Leeds United, Liverpool and Manchester City all in with a chance in the final weeks.
Malcolm Allison at Manchester City went for it by signing Queens Park Rangers star player Rodney Marsh to strengthen the squad. He was one of many creative ‘number tens’ in the league, along with Tony Currie at Sheffield United, Alan Hudson at Chelsea and Trevor Brooking at West Ham United, and these were the days when they also wore the number ten.
Marsh, by his own admission, was not fit enough and failed to fit in until the final games by which time City were too far behind. Malcolm Allison’s position at the club was weaker as a result.
Leeds were arguably the best squad, but injuries to key players like Allan Clarke and Eddie Gray, an insistence on playing Gary Sprake in goal and a fixture pile-up at the end of the season threatened to cost them. Here is Sprake in action among clips of Palace goals from the season before:
Leeds ended up having to play Wolves away on the Monday after the Cup final (which they won 1-0 beating Arsenal), needing a win to overtake Derby, managed that season by the quiet unassuming Brian Clough.
Derby had finished all their games and were off on a jolly to Malta, where they tracked progress of the Leeds game, and a Liverpool versus Arsenal game that might have also denied them the title, via a hotel pay phone. Not quite the excitement of that extra time winner from Sergio Aguero!
In the end, Wolverhampton Wanderers overcame an exhausted Leeds side 2-1 and Liverpool missed loads to chances in a scoreless draw with Arsenal. Derby had won the title by a point!
Neither of the games was shown live.
Can you imagine Sky Sports allowing this to happen these days? The FA Cup Final was the one live club game shown all season, so that date was sacred. Completing the league fixtures was subservient to that!
These were the early days of colour telly, with BBC and regional ITV companies sharing coverage – in London we had ‘The Big Match’ anchored by the great Brian Moore – but the television packages were highlights only.
There is still some pretty good footage available even if Palace are largely absent, except it seems being on the receiving end of goals of the season.
The BBC summarised their coverage in a ‘Match of the Seventies’ compilation, fronted by Dennis Waterman, who was at least banned from singing even if his links stank of cheese.
Then look for links for parts two, three and four.
The coverage is pretty good – the voices of John Motson, Barry Davies and the glorious ‘one nil’ cry of David Coleman are pretty familiar. But the football does seem from another age. The shirts are wonderfully simple in design. There is no advertising, no name on the back, and sometimes no badge on the shirt.
The quality of the pitches through the autumn and winter months were appalling. There were more league games in those days, as well as reserve games. The pitches never had a chance to recover until the grass started growing again naturally in March.
What I also found odd was the number of goals scored in the six yard box. Part of the explanation for that lies with the match ball which was heavier and often got stuck on the surface.
It also seems that tactically teams seemed happier to play much deeper. Penalty boxes seemed full of players in open play and goal keepers controlled very little space.
An absence of television money, poor pitches and tactical naivety meant that it was a time where it was still possible for ‘regional’ teams, like Derby, to out-perform the big city teams with bigger grounds, through a mix of local youth development, canny signings and smart managers.
Palace did not quite have enough of any of these.
The season proved a struggle for Palace. Many of the new signings failed to settle in and there appeared to be growing dissatisfaction with the management of Bert Head, especially after popular coach George Petchey had left for Orient.
Twenty years later, Palace once again had a third season in the top tier, and the themes of player dissatisfaction, manager exhaustion and an apparent failure of new signings to settle in, were to return.
Palace were to finish adrift third bottom, twentieth spot. They were two points behind nineteenth place, but four points clear of Nottingham Forest and Huddersfield Town, who have not been near the top flight since.
Fortunately there were only two relegation places and Palace lived for fight for one more season, splashing out £170,000 for our very own number ten, the great Don Rogers, ahead of the 1972/73 season. By March of that season, the flamboyant Malcolm Allison had taken over from Bert Head after failing to win the league at City the year before.
To end with, here is a Big Match clip of the game against Chelsea which is perhaps typical of Palace’s season. Chelsea were a mid-table side, a year or two past their peak and about to head into almost terminal decline, but Palace were not able to take any points off them – it was a nice finish from Mel Blyth though!
As a post-script, here are ITV’s Goals of the season, not featuring Palace!
