October 29 2008

Selhurst Park

Over 15,000 brave spectators braved the awful weather to see Palace lose 1-2 to Nottingham Forest. Jamesey wasn't among them.

My excuses for giving the Forest home game a miss are as follows. I am enduring a horrible chest infection; I am of an age and health condition where the quacks advise me to keep warm; and I couldn't really be arsed.

I suppose my season card seat will be classed as occupied in the attendance figures.

But I didn't turn up and by the sound of it neither did most of the team.

So, forgive me, gentle readers, while many of you were enduring freezing rain, bone-chilling winds and rotten football I was listening to the game on Palace World radio and cranking up the central heating as the storms tested my double glazing.

Neil Warnock has been with us for just over a year now, and many of us will remember last season as being a truly remarkable one.

It took a few weeks for the Warnock Effect to kick in but when it did it was almost a repeat of the Dowie Miracle of 03-04, except, of course, we got to the play-offs but not the final and the Holy Grail of all football chairmen, the Heapsodosh-ship.

I think many of us were hoping to consolidate last season's excellent spadework and really push for an automatic promotion spot.

This of course is still feasible but we know that to entertain high hopes in football often courts disaster.

After 12 league games and nearly three months we are a team that plays in fits and starts. After our promising three-game run of maximum points we have now gleaned one point from the last three.

We are conceding late goals. Could anything be more soul-destroying than totally ruining what would have been a priceless point at Birmingham (Oct 1) by conceding in the fourth minute of stoppage time.

And although our 2-2 draw at Blackpool (Oct 25) was a creditable enough result, we twice gave away the lead.

I will be back at my station for the Owls match on Saturday and must shamefacedly confess the reasons for my absence to my season card neighbours.

I just hope we can start to show a bit more of the grit, determination and concentration that were so often abundant in the later stages of 07-08.

Email Jamesey with your comments to jevans3704@aol.com

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