April 8 2013

Are you Palace in disguise? Barnsley were wearing the Eagles away strip.

Jamesey emerges from winter hibernation to visit Selhurst for our match against Barnsley.

At the last live Palace game I watched in mid-February we were scoring goals with gay abandon (am I allowed to use that expression any more or is it classed as homophobic?).

We banged in four against Middlesbrough and were looking like a good bet for the second automatic promotion spot.

But, of course, things change in football like everything else and now in our previous three matches we had scored none and let in eight. Would the visit of the Tykes (April 6) - who were struggling in fifth-from-bottom place in the table - see us reopen the floodgates and start banging them in again?

Well, at least the weather relented and with the thermometer rising to several degrees above freezing, it felt positively spring-like.

After a long wait for a not-very-tasty piece of cod served up by yet another batch of plonkers (the fourth since the Chinese family sold up?) in what used to be the excellent Lap Hing chippie, I made my way to my customary entry gate to the Arthur Wait to find unprecedented queues of people fighting to get in.

My senior moments are becoming more frequent as the sands of time flow ever faster so maybe I had been asleep for longer than I thought, we had been promoted and this was our first game in the Loadsamoulah League against Arsenal.

By the time I clawed my way to my seat it was obvious that the whole stadium was stuffed to the gunwhales and subsequently the official gate was quoted as 21,281. In all seriousness, surely Kids for a Quid couldn't entirely account for such a huge leap in attendance?

Whatever the explanation, another surreal moment occurred when the teams ran out.

It was Palace at home in red-and-blue versus Palace away in blue, yellow and white.

It transpired that whatever the Tykes were proposing to wear was too similar to our usual Selhurst strip, so CPFC had given them a set of our away stuff to wear.

As the first half went on it was becoming apparent that a goalfest was not going to be on the menu.

Jon Williams provided some fine passes but none of his team-mates had the wit to make anything of them and Wilfried Zaha ran through his entertaining box of tricks but without any end-product.

It was a pleasure to see Eddie McGoldrick on the pitch at half-time although what he was doing there I couldn't really work out.

Eddie was too far away to see if he still had his famous tash.

He was a superb servant to CPFC but, like Geoff Thomas, when he decided to leave after our 1993 relegation. he never fulfilled his promise at Arsenal or anywhere else.

The second half followed much the same pattern and many of the more vociferous spectators near me made their anger known when Aaron Wilbraham was brought on in place of Glenn Murray in the 80th minute.

It has to be said that Aaron did miss a couple of sitters that Glenn would possibly have knocked in blindfolded.

Polishing up my rose-tinted spectacles, amazingly we are still in fourth place in the Championship although our rivals have games midweek and next Saturday while we have none, so that could quickly change.

Putting the rose-tints back in their case, we have gained one point out of the last 12 and gone more than six hours without scoring a goal.

After looking like strong promotion contenders since last autumn,it would be deeply disappointing to feebly collapse and miss the opportunity now.

Email Jamesey with your comments to jevans3704@aol.com

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