September 3 2006

Andy Johnson

Wot no Palace? No, it's the first weekend of the Euro-2008 qualifying games. Jamesey hurried to his local pub to see the England v Andorra match (Sept 2).

We have hardly recovered from the agony of Germany this summer and England's lamentable failure to do themselves justice when, I'll be jiggered, off we start on another tournament campaign.

In a moment of weakness and recklessly not consulting the football fixture diary, I had agreed to attend a children's party. It was my grandnephew's fifth birthday, so Mrs J and myself made the short-in-mileage but long-in-time journey down the clogged south London roads to West Croydon.

It was a great pleasure to see little Bobby dismantling his presents and goading the other grandnephews and grandnieces into potential homicide but it was still a relief to get home, clean off the jelly, custard and sticky Smartie residue off my clothes, and scoot down to the pub to see England again.

I am a passionate England supporter but I am horribly conscious of the Palace vacuum during international weekends. At least we had two consolations.

Apart from the pleasure of seeing England win 5-0 and play some decent football in the post-Sven era (some, of course, will say we should have won 15-0 but I'll happily settle for what we got), we had two ex-CPFC figures to observe.

Terry Venables, ex-player and twice manager was sitting next to Steve McClaren on the bench, looking increasingly like an Essex Buddha and our former striker and fervid Evertonian shirt-kisser (well, he has to doesn't he?), Andrew Johnson was in the squad.

I won't repeat the Venables story yet again but he was part of a very successful period in the late 70s and early 80s. We went up to the top tier. He departed. We came down and I have never really come across a sensible explanation of the events that led to all that.The less said about his second coming in the late 90s the better

Andrew Johnson came to us as a bit of makeweight when Clinton Morrison threw in his lot with Birmingham City a few seasons back.

A Brum-supporting colleague at the time told me with great glee that we had got a bum deal and that AJ was a little bloke who ran about a lot, got injured and went off.

And that was how it seemed to me for a while until his superb two seasons got us up to the Premiership and almost kept us there.

Well, in the Andorra game, he came on in the second half and almost scored and then provided Peter Crouch with a slide-rule pass in front of goal which certainly should have been converted.

No Palace to watch but an evening full of generally pleasant memories.

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