I don’t think PV is a terrible manager but he had appeared to have lost the changing room towards the end. The fact Eze wasn’t playing is quite laughable when we think about it now with the benefit of hindsight. PV had an excellent first season and was very quickly able to gel a team of strangers into one playing decent, attractive football. He deserves credit for that.

Something had to change with our dire run of form. It’s quite easy to say PV would have got results against the lesser teams, but I’m not sure. Had we lost the first two matches against Leicester and Leeds they would have leapfrogged us and we’d have been bang in trouble. The new manager bounce was timed to perfection.

I’ve always liked Roy and those who previously criticised his ‘Royball’ tactics seem to forget he had the oldest squad in the league with a chronic lack of firepower. He did extremely well with limited resources to not just an avoid relegation, but comfortably so. He was never given the war chest Vieira had.

Well done Parish for getting the big calls right as usual and well done Roy for doing a cracking job. My gut tells me that Roy will be here next season.

As opposed to be sitting on the bench?

He was a sub on 10 occasions. He's played in 37 games in total (that includes cup games). Ayew has the most with 38 games.

Cup 'games', so does that mean he's HASN'T played in all the league games (ie 36)?

Palace since 19 August 1972. Palace 1 (Tony Taylor) Liverpool 1 (Emlyn Hughes)

Vieira had the same tools as Roy, but he did not have any clue how to use them.

This aligns perfectly to my baking analogy: one may have the ingredients but does one know how to put them together in the correct proportions and bake at the correct temperature for the correct amount of time?

In football terms it's trying to put square pegs in round holes and using the wrong tactical formation for the players at hand. PV was guilty of this, the most egregious example being the belief that Jeff Schlupp could perform as a central holding midfielder in a 3 man midfield, and then sticking with it when it clearly wasn't working.
I'm not sure what PV wanted from Eze, but he was extremely poor under PV; Roy has fixed that by giving Eze the freedom to do his thing. It needs a proper midfield base for the front line to flourish, and we can see clearly that Hughes was misused by PV.
Ultimately the players look far happier, this is a sign worth noting.