Sound Of Football Episode 36 - Relegation, promotion, relegation again and survival

This week, Terry recounts the traumatic events at Selhurst Park on Monday as Crystal Palace battled to stay in the Championship, then we look at the prospects of the newly promoted clubs from the English second tier.

After that, the chaps look at the prospects for the clubs relegated from the Premier League before slagging off Gold and Sullivan, not for the first time it must be said.

You can listen to the podcast here or if you right-click on that link, you can download the MP3. Alternatively, you can subscribe via the your reader of choice or via our iTunes feed.

Warnock to quit as Palace boss...?

Some strange news release activity has taken place casting doubt over the future of Neil Warnock as Crystal Palace manager.

Yesterday, the following Tweet was sent from a Crystal Palace news Twitter account.

"Warnock confirms quit plans: Crystal Palace manager Neil Warnock has announced that he will retir.. ERROR"

Being a Palace supporter I frantically scanned the news to learn more of the timing of Neil Warnock's departure form the Eagles. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I found nothing from any other news source.

Baffled as to why such an announcement could go unnoticed by the football media ('it's only Palace' was not a sufficient reason, I decided) I went back to the Tweet to check that I wasn't mistaken and I wasn't.

The interesting thing about it was the big 'ERROR' at the end which is where the web address to the story was supposed to be. This Twitter feed uses an application that periodically scans certain RSS feeds called Twitterfeed. Once it finds an updated RSS it cleverly puts it together as a tweet, adds the web address of the original story and sends it out. Anyone following that Twitter stream has it pop up on their own stream just like that, as Tommy Cooper would say.

The absence of the web address suggests that the story was originally published but removed shortly thereafter. By that time the RSS feed had already updated @crystalpalacefc's Twitter stream and would have picked up the updated feed as usual. The big difference was that the web page containing the story no longer existed, hence the big 'ERROR' instead.

So far, so mysterious. There is a rumour knocking about that Warnock will retire at the end of the season and it would appear that something was about to be published on this subject and for some reason was either removed or stopped at a very late stage followed by a retraction.

It may have been a genuine mistake based on a rumour. It may have been an angry phone call from the Palace Press Office. It may be nothing at all since we do not know the source of the original material. It may have come from a buck of part time bloggers who have put two and two together and got five.

However, professional hacks have gone with less so Some People Are On The Pitch are going to confidently, nay stridently state that we understand that Neil Warnock will retire as manager of Crystal Palace at the end of the season... of course we may have misunderstood.

...and for a news feed that always gives you the facts straight, follow @spaotp on Twitter to keep abreast of all the latest info from Some People Are On The Pitch.

Bostock & Bondage

If John Bostock ever goes on to fulfil his promise, he may find himself associated with similar headlines to the above but in an entirely different context. Bostock is a 16 year old wonderkid. A midfielder held in the same esteem as Rooney, Walcott and Ramsey. The kind of player destined for greatness. When such a player comes through to a club like Palace they rarely stick around for very long before they're off to a bigger club to fulfil their destiny/rot in the reserves. In such a situation, the role of the club is to cash in as much as possible by getting the player on a contract, putting them in the side and waiting for the offers to roll in. Palace have been blessed in that they have a number of such players in Victor Moses, Lee Hills and Sean Scannell who, all being well, will become permanent fixtures in Palace’s first team next season before inevitably moving on, probably for big money. Unfortunately, for the club at least, Bostock will not be joining them.

Bostock joined the Palace academy at the age of seven. He's a local lad and a season ticket holder. Last season, at fifteen, he made his first team debut. He was offered a professional contract by club chairman Simon Jordan and a place in the heart of the team by manager Neil Warnock. According to Palace, he said yes. However, by the time it came to putting pen to paper, he'd done what teenagers are prone to do, and changed his mind. Tottenham Hotspur offered him a better deal and as a youth player not on a professional contract he was perfectly entitled to move north of the river, so he did.

The reaction from Palace was predictable and perhaps understandable. Jordan was livid. He cancelled Bostock's season ticket and refunded his money. As the club who brought him through the youth ranks, Palace were entitled to a transfer fee. Since an amount couldn’t be agreed with Spurs the decision went to a tribunal, a system notorious in its conservatism. Tottenham were instructed to pay £700,000 rising to £1.25 million subject to conditions. Jordan went mad, appearing on Sky Sports News ranting and raving. Aaron Ramsey, a year older and with only a few more games experience behind him went to Arsenal for £5 million. Bostock could conceivably have gone for millions more than the tribunal determined had he been sold on the open market. Where, he asked, is the incentive for smaller clubs to develop talent if they are going to get stitched on the price? It’s difficult, particularly for me since I'm a Palace supporter, not to feel sympathy with them and other clubs in the past and future who have and will lose out like this.

The problem fundamentally is the transfer market itself. Some of the prices paid for untried talent beggars belief. In that respect, you can't blame a tribunal for refusing to get involved in all this senseless price-taggery. At the same time, the transfer market exists and clubs like Palace rely on it as a revenue stream. It may be crazy but it’s there. Southampton (Gareth Bale and Theo Walcott) and Cardiff City (Aaron Ramsey) have garnered huge transfer fees by combining the market with a strong youth policy. Shouldn't all clubs who nurture quality players expect to reap similar rewards?

On the surface, it’s difficult to come up with a solution, short of ditching the transfer market and shifting the way the game is financed and its players exchanged to another system and there doesn’t seem to be much of an appetite for that course. People are entitled to sell their labour to whoever will buy. Bostock's clearly an ambitious lad in a hurry who believes that his prospects will improve in the Tottenham reserves rather than in the Palace first team. I'm sure he's being paid more as well. But at the same time, it hardly seems fair on Palace that they have invested in this lad and not be able to profit where other clubs have. There must be plenty of stories that don't occupy headlines all over Europe of clubs who have lost out in this way.

Ideally, a system should be devised where youth players who, irrespective of signing a professional contract with their club, can move on while the clubs get compensated according to the market rate. Two ways of doing this spring to mind:

Change the rules to compel the Transfer Tribunal to take the transfer market rate into account when determining a valuation.

Bond the player to the club until the age of 18 or 21. That way a player is contracted by default and would guarantee a fee based on the market rate.

Both ideas are problematic.

Taking the tribunal route still leaves lots of room for dispute. Clubs are always disagreeing about player valuations (Gareth Barry) and there will always be problems establishing the criteria for determining what the correct market rate is supposed to be.

The second option sounds medieval doesn't it? Yet the practise of bonding trainees to companies from an early age continues to this day. A couple of years ago I visited a firm in Cambridge who supply aircraft for the RAF (don't ask). They took 16-year-olds on straight from school and trained them up to perform highly skilled and specialised work. They were bonded to the firm for 10 years to stop them from upping and leaving for a rival firm who offered them more money. "We don't want to spend all this time and money training them up only to see them f**k off to the competition" I was told. They would be free to move on while still only in their mid-twenties when there bondage period ends and the more I thought about it the less oppressive an idea it seemed.

It may be that bonding players to a club is a more elegant solution (although ten years seems a very long time). There is existing Government legislation to cover this form of employment which would have the benefit of restricting the involvement of bungling football officials in drafting new rules. There will need to be adequate protection for young players against exploitation from clubs but in a culture of poaching and tapping up, bonding young players to their clubs may help secure revenue for that club while stopping bigger clubs and avaricious agents from agitating for a move before they have to shell out for a whopping transfer fee. At the same time the player is given the security of a contract at a critical stage of their development.

In all likelihood nothing will change. The current system suits the big clubs. How long it will be though before lower division clubs decide that their resources are better spent on strengthening their first team rather than wasting time and money on players who are just going to “f**k off to the competition” as soon as a decent offer comes along? It’s got to be easier and cheaper than going to all the trouble of employing coaches and recruiting youngsters, right?

Obscure Kits From British Football History #5

Crystal Palace (home)1971/1972 season

When it comes to football kits, there are only so many different designs you can create which are simple, distinguished and can last the test of time. Whoever it was that decided black and white stripes were a winning combination must still be receiving royalties from Juventus, Newcastle United, Botafogo and many other clubs to this day.

Similarly, that pairing up of green and white hoops must have put a very large tick in the box for the people running Celtic and Sporting Lisbon when they were trying to work out what their team should wear.

As for Ajax, they must be have one of the most exclusive niches of all, thanks to that very individualistic broad red stripe running down the middle of their clean white shirts.

We can only guess it was this last example that prompted the chairman of Crystal Palace to go for something similar in the early 1970's when he opted to change the team's strip, but a big red stripe was too obvious. What they needed was something that nodded noticeably in that direction yet had a degree of distinction that would make the design all their own.

And so it was that in the 1971/72 season, Crystal Palace FC unleashed the following kit onto an unsuspecting world:



Yes, witness one and all the Double Stripe of Crystal Palace, replete in claret and blue.

Now at this point, the younger folk amongst you may be starting to make comparisons with the kit Crystal Palace wore on and off from 1976 onwards - you know, the one with the red and blue diagonal sash on a white background.

The thing to note here, though, is that while these days we're all used to seeing Palace wearing red and blue the whole time, back then their kit sported decidedly Burnleyesque hues.

So this was something of a radical departure from either claret and blue shirts or plain white ones as had been worn before it. This was a bold move and one which perhaps epitomised a brave new identity for the team and one which would would spark a change of fortunes for Crystal Palace.

It was. Call it coincidence if you will, but the introduction of the double-stripe initiated a gradual decline for the club which would see them drop from the First Division to the Third in the space of three seasons. As if to admit the new styling had had a derogatory effect on them, Crystal Palace altered their kit slightly for 1972/73, separating the claret and blue stripes with a thin white one.

It had no effect. Palace languished in the Second and Third Divisions until 1980 when Terry Venables' managerial expertise put them back where they were a decade earlier, but by then the claret and blue had gone, as had that distinctive two-stripe design.

It's interesting to note that this jinx of a design has never been reintroduced by the club since, although it was chosen by the fans as the basis for a special kit to be worn in celebration of Palace's centenary in 2005. In the two games it appeared in, both of them ended as 2-0 wins for Crystal Palace.

Maybe they were a bit harsh to abandon that design after all...