Oh Mister Roy, where did it all go wrong?
A worst defeat to Brighton since 1956 created exactly the sort of visual metaphors which usually precede a sacking, but what to do when the potential sackee is an OAP club legend?
When a manager is failing, there is often a very visible point at which their position becomes untenable. For Roy Hodgson, this moment was achieved eight minutes into the second half of Crystal Palace's match at Brighton. Not only were they losing 3-0 at half-time and playing as though barely introduced to each other in one of the most important games of the season, but Hodgson was set to take a gamble that lived and died in just eight minutes.
Michael Olise is a very important player for Palace, and had been out with a groin injury. He was not fit to start. This was all common knowledge. It was also common knowledge that aggravating that injury could lead to greater issues than he'd already experienced this season, and… he’s experienced quite some injuries this season. Presumably as a last roll of the dice, Olise was thrown on. Eight minutes later, he limped off. Brighton won the match 4-1 in the end. It's difficult to believe that this isn't a full stop for Hodgson and Palace, and that the sight of Olise trudging back up the tunnel wasn't a fitting allegory.
It was the certainly the crowning turd on a dismal afternoon for Palace. They were a goal down inside three minutes, and the result of it all was their worst result against Brighton in almost 70 years. And the Premier League, as a result of this, starts to take a lightly different look. Palace remain in 14th place in the table, but two the three separating them from the bottom three have games in hand, while Everton may yet get points back from the Premier League. Looking at the table, it’s not difficult to see how they could get sucked into a relegation fight for which they are not in the slightest bit prepared.
Nobody wants this. The decision to bring Hodgson back after running out of patience with Patrick Vieira last season made some degree of sense. Palace were in a spot of bother. Rather than bringing in somebody from the outside, which would be a huge and obvious gamble, why not hand it over to the old master for a few months and get him to fix the (as things turned out eminently fixable) issues that were holding them team back? The issue came when that contract was extended by a further year. Did all concerned understand what they were undertaking to, or was this just a case of the heart ruling the head on all sides of the equation?
There were similar calls for Hodgson to stand down after a similarly insipid defeat to Bournemouth at the start of December, but the club decided to stand their ground. And it is worth remembering that Palace have been inconsistent rather than just plain bad since Christmas. Losing to Chelsea and Arsenal in the Premier League was hardly an enormous surprise and they have beaten Brentford and Sheffield United since then too. But losing after a replay in the FA Cup to Everton was a disappointment. They were never in the races in losing 5-0 at The Emirates Stadium, and the Brighton result provided a fresh level of visual metaphor for a team on the slide.
And in the eventuality that this came to pass, there would remain the valid question of… well, what next? There are managers available (there are always managers available somewhere), but coming a few days after the end of the January transfer window, any new manager would be stuck with the players he’s inherited until the end of this season and would have to stamp their identity onto a existing group of players rather than beiong able to bring in players who could do the specifics jobs that the new person wants them to do. In this specific case, Palace had even spent money during the transfer window just closed. And not just that; the £30m that they invested in that last window was more than any other club in the Premier League.
Unless you’re already in the sort of tailspin which means that spinning a coin is a more attractive option than sticking with what you’ve got, sacking any manager at this time of year is a huge gamble. Thre history of the Premier League is littered with the corpses of those who took a desperate gamble only to find that nothing improved, and in some cases got considerably worse. So no matter how bad things were at the Amex on Saturday afternoon, replacing Mister Roy is nowhere near as straightforward as it at might at first appear.
But the issue with the club’s recent transfer dealings seems pretty clear. Where Palace have been active in the transfer market, it’s been on young players from the Championship, of which the highest profile was the arrival of Adam Wharton from Blackburn Rovers last month. But that doesn’t seem exactly concgruous with Hodgson, who it has always been assumed was something of a stop-gap managerial appointment in the first place, especially as Hodgson tends to favour more experienced players.
It’s this lack of joined-up thinking which forces that impression that Crystal Palace can look more dysfunctional than they actually are. They can dig out results everyonce in a while. There have been no disastrous lengthy runs without a win of any sort, this season. But at the same time, they’ve now won just three Premier League games since the end of September, and if that sort of form does continue, the object in their rear view mirror that is slipping into the Championship could turn out to be closer than they realised.
This sort of thing starts from the head down. Steve Parish may still be the chairman of Crystal Palace, the careful custodian of long standing, but he isn’t really the owner of the club. He has less than a 10% shareholding. And with his caution contrasting with more recent joinee John Textor, it seems all the more accentuated. He has a 45% stake in the club, and there seems to be a disconnect between the way in which he feels it should be run and the way in which Parish does. This may not be reflected in the way in which the club is managed, but it’s difficult to imagine that there aren’t tensions behind the scenes.
A new stand is to be built at Selhurst Park that will increase its capacity to more than 34,000. But that stand will become considerably more troublesome to fund and that new, increased capacity will be considerably more difficult to fill should the club find itself getting relegated relegated from the Premier League. As long-serving members of the division, Palace should be insulated against the shock of relegation, but history shows us that the clubs who’ve not really been expecting relegation and who aren’t prepared for it can be those who struggle with it the most.
All eyes will be on Mister Roy, because that’s where our eyes always fixate. But it feels as though he is a symptom rather a cause of the current Selhurst Park malaise.