October 28 2003

Crystal Palace

Shocked by the moaning and groaning going on at the moment, Jamesey pleads for a little common sense

My last column (Oct 23) dealt with two issues...or at least that was what I intended. The first issue was the futility of constantly shouting "Jordan Out" and the second point was the fickleness and hysteria of some of our supporters.

Later I even posted a fairly mild pop at one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse on the Palace board, in what I thought was a fairly genial and p***-taking sort of tone.

I was challenged in no uncertain terms at my effrontery in "DARING" to tell him who to support.

Well, it seems to me that if you constantly whinge and whine about how unwatchable are the team you claim to support, you are inviting a third party to suggest you nip along and support somebody else.

My sense of perspective was also cast into doubt because we were once a big {are we smaller now?} club and that I was "comparing the club now to completely different circumstances".

Well, er yes, perspective is all about comparing the club in different circumstances. The perspective I am looking at now is from a mid-50s-early-60s very small club scrabbling about in the Fourth Division and the Third Division South and all the seesaw events over the past half century.

And my perspective is that to get suicidal over losing a lot of games in the current Nationwide Div 1 and the form of the team (however disappointing) before the end of October 2003 is pretty gutless.

I was also taken to task for saying in my Oct 23 article that "a requirement of being a football fan is that one has to be a sycophant". Well not really. What I actually said was that bellowing "Jordan Out" is pointless because the bloke owns the club.

Otherwise, if it makes anyone happy, they can send emails, walk down the Holmesdale Road carrying a placard or place an ad in the personal columns of the Independent or whatever soothes them. But there's still no point.

Well I won't quote any more of the extraordinary delusions contained in that particular posting except to say that it is worrying that the mindset might be adopted by too many other supporters.

The sign-off was "Paranoia, paranoia, everybody's coming to get me". I am much too polite to make any comment on that.

Finally, as the site's editor can confirm, the Jordan column drew more emails of support and agreement than any of the past two years.

Email Jamesey with any of your comments to Jevans3704@aol.com

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