A book about Crystal Palace’s under-achieving team of the 1980s is reviewed by Eric Brown…
BY ERIC BROWN
Looking back now, it is rather difficult to comprehend why Crystal Palace ever earned the tag “The Team of the Eighties.”
After all, they suffered relegation at the start of the decade and did not regain their lost top-flight place until near the end of it.
Yes, they had outstanding youngsters who really should have matured into hungry trophy-seekers.
But some left for rival clubs and others didn’t quite fulfil their enormous potential before the Nineties kicked in.
I started in sports journalism covering Crystal Palace for a local newspaper and was looking forward to discovering what went wrong at Selhurst Park from a new book.
Stephen Brandt’s “The Team That Could Have Been” charts the events at Palace around the 1980s.
However, I searched in vain for an explanation of why a team managed by Malcolm Allison and then Terry Venables fell apart instead of challenging for top-flight honours.
Palace expected five players from their 1977 FA Youth Cup-winning squad to provide a glittering first-team future for years.
Yet it never really happened in Palace colours for the likes of Peter Nicholas, Kenny Sansom, Billy Gilbert, Jerry Murphy and Vince Hilaire.
All were gone by the time a Mark Bright-Ian Wright inspired side gained promotion at the end of the 1980s.
Nicholas even managed to leave Palace twice, returning after a spell at Arsenal and then departing for Luton.
I kept awaiting insight into why a project initiated by Allison and coach Venables fell flat as a pancake. I searched for some explanation from the players involved or even from someone in the know in the boardroom. Nothing.
The best the author can do is attribute the start of the decline to the departure of Sansom for Arsenal. Big deal. Small club sells best player to big club, which allows them to pay wages and sign less effective replacements – happens all the time, has done for years, and will do for many more years.
Without an authoritative explanation for the ‘house of cards’ collapse, this book sadly falls as flat as its subject.
The author’s research seems limited largely to a tedious series of match reports after opening with 50 or so irrelevant pages dealing with the establishment of THE Crystal Palace, fighting on the streets of south London, and racism.
By the time I spotted Sansom’s surname spelt ‘Samson’, I concluded this was an amateurish attempt at explaining such an important spell in Palace history.
Many fine sports books find their way to my door for review. This isn’t one of them.
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