Streatham Malkie always bemoans my lack of mention of his beloved Crystal Palace. They’re a football team. Apparently. In the Premiership. And, generally, I don’t mention them purely in consideration for him and his fellow sufferers. Sorry, fellow fans. Because if I’d spoken of Palace in the last few months, it was not going to be good. It would have been after another loss, another disaster, more heaps of shit. And I’m not the sort of man to inflict such salt into the tender wounds of poor, misguided sports fans. Unless they’re Chelsea fans, obviously, or Arsenal fans, for whom, pretty much, salt is too good and something more caustic is preferable.

No more. No more the poor guys, the fall guys, the lost boys of the League. Big Sam’s comin’ and its all gonna change. Palace sacked Alan Pardew this week, their failing manager and, in the current mode of such things, had the new manager pass through the old one’s still fresh exhaust fumes as he entered the club car park. Unless Pardew drives a Prius. Then we need another metaphor.

Personally I like Big Sam. And I don’t like many Northerners, on principle. Only my wife. But she’s never been embroiled in a Newspaper Sleaze ‘sting’ operation by the ‘now stooping to the lowest fucking amoeba-like life-form of gutter-breeding slime-Press’ Daily Telegraph. If she had, we’d be rich. Sam, on the other hand, lost his job as England manager after just 67 games and one measly match, due to the tragic work of fiction that awful newspaper fabricated to discredit the man. If the Sun had done it there’d be a public inquiry, but the Telegraph, steeped in its crusty veneer of Gentleman’s Club, Tory Establishmentism, was taken at face value.

Love him or hate him though, if your club was 4th from bottom of the pile at Christmas time and it was all going rotten, he would be number one on your list for Santa. His mixture of probably quite brutal authority (he’s a fucking bully) with the pragmatic approach (‘break their fucking legs if you have to’) wins him no fans ever from teams he plays against. But his team’s fans will appreciate that in most cases he does what is needed. He keeps teams up. As he did at Bolton, at Blackburn Rovers, at West Ham and Sunderland. Even a loud-mouthed Northerner gets credit for that.

Gotta lorra time for Big Sam, he may be the ultimate pragmatist, but he’s also clever, funny and in his own way, rather charming.

Come on you Eagles (that is the first and last time you’ll ever see those words by my hand)

Happy Christmas

A xxxx