September 2 2009

Crystal Palace

The perennial cry of most football supporters is how inconsistent their teams are. Jamesey tends to agree.

My sentiments after attending the Man City Carling Cup home defeat and watching our Championship draw with Peterborough United on Sky TV is that the legend "Winning is everything", emblazoned above the Palace team photograph, is not altogether true.

To qualify that statement, one must say that losing game after game in the league will naturally result in relegation, not a desirable end-product.

But why is it that we can turn in a performance, mainly in the first half, like we did against "Citeh" and look so awful against the Posh?

It wasn't a big crowd at Selhurst when the Man City moneybags came to town but although we lost 0-2 when the millionaires woke up and exerted their class, I felt very proud of our superb performance.

Although at my age I should know far better, I held high hopes that our excellent display might, for once, continue the trend against the Posh.

Forget it. In one of the worst Palace efforts for a quite a while, we were terrible. Where had all the desire, passion, accurate passing and goal attempts gone?

Peterborough hadn't won a game in the league this season and that is always a danger signal when Palace are in the frame.

However, we drew the match, one-all, thanks to Alan Lee's second-half shinned score.

Neil Warnock seemed well pleased with a point although Peterborough are hardly the level of opposition where an away draw should be anything to exalt about.

But I have never encountered a supporter yet who didn't complain about his or her side's unpredictability.

The truth is that unless you support a team backed by zillionaires, with money sensibly spent by a good manager, the majority of results will inevitably be topsy-turvy.

We have had our spells of consistency and, who knows, we could kick in to a spell of winning results. Something we all hope for.

But we will have to play like we did against Man C, not like we did against the Posh...

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