One day like this will see fans right
Palace’s Cup final win showed what fans really want
What do football fans want? What do they dream of?
It’s not complicated and it’s not what we’ve been sold for the past thirty years.
It was in the faces of the fans of cup-winners Crystal Palace and Newcastle United, in season 2024/25. Unmistakeable, uncontrolled joy.
It’s about getting your historic day. When things finally go right and your team wins the Cup. And once that happens, maybe another will come. But nobody can take away that day, the feeling of your club finally lifting a trophy, often tied in with the emotions of generations of your family who didn’t get to see it. Watching your team win something together.
Funnily enough, finishing fifth in the Premier League or even reaching the top flight, for all the European implications and big matches ahead, doesn’t rouse the same emotions. The TV companies told you it did. And still do.
It took Crystal Palace 119 years to win the FA Cup, via that 1-0 victory over Manchester City at Wembley. The competition remains the world’s best cup competition (in format and the opportunity it provides so far down the pyramid). It will never regain its former ‘major national event’ status but remains precious, and in better shape that it was a decade ago.
Some of the fans at Wembley and in that part of south London will have gone through the agonising final against Manchester United in 1990, where they nearly did it (with Ian Wright playing a part) but had to settle for a 3-3 draw and lost the replay. Finally, they got their day in the sun, literally. They looked like they were in utopia.
It’s slightly weird to be writing this, but I’m glad I am. Weird because I’m celebrating the joy of Crystal Palace fans, a club I haven’t actually liked since the very early 80s, when they had a brilliant white kit with a red and blue sash, the cultish Vince Hilaire in the team and Terry Venables as manager!
I’m not from south London you see, I’m from south east London. So I used to go and watch Charlton and then Millwall with friends. Crystal Palace were a rival club for fans pf south east London teams, but for me it was just indifference, for decades.
This continued when I started reporting, even when I got to cover an excellent Palace team with Wright, Bright and co, up near the top of the entire League in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s. The journey to Selhurst Park was a pain in the backside (poor diadems, I had to go up into central London, and down again) and I didn’t much like their ground or the new red and blue kit. In hindsight there were upsides, such as the way experienced managers Steve Coppell and Alan Smith treated me with such respect, as a young journalist.
My Palace dislike peaked with the Simon Jordan reign. He’s not my thing, particularly as a ‘broadcaster’. I didn’t get him then, or why he’s allowed to wildly overplay his part now.
But the club, now under Steve Parish, has a good track record for its work in the community, and has played some lovely football this season under Austrian Oliver Glasner (what a day for Austria, they won Eurovision too!).
Good friends from down the years are Palace fans, including my Horsham buddy Mark Wood, Nick Dickson, Mark Demuth, and Dan Slawson (from the brilliant Proper Football website). I’m really pleased for them, despite being genuine in my disinterest in how Palace are getting in in the Premier League. (A difference between the media nonsense and real football lovers is we don’t need to pretend to be enthused by or fair to every club. Sometimes our dislike of a club can be random. As the youngsters say – it’s not that deep!)
There are also Palace fans I know of who didn’t get to see it, and will have been in the thoughts of their loved ones on Cup final day. This victory really meant something. I even smiled at a picture from someone I haven’t met, the brilliant comedian Jack Skipper, who posted a picture of three generations of his family heading to Wembley. This is what fans dream of, not the ‘battle for seventh’.
At the start of the day I’d been bemoaning the final not being that major event it was. Then I got distracted by a typically classless Pep’s refusal to shake the hand of the Palace keeper Henderson, who might have been sent off but wasn’t. My friend Judge Jones on a message group said to me it’s “about Palace” not Pep. And he’s a Spurs fan! He was right.
If you wanted to look at those delirious crying Palace fans and still be indifferent then that’s up to you. When I saw a bunch of Croydon schoolboys in a frenzy of joy (if we’re honest there are still not enough black children, or indeed black adults at football matches) I was beaming myself.
In the past 40 years Palace are just the third club to win the FA Cup for the first time since 1988. The others are Leicester (2021), Wigan (2013). In ’88 it was Wimbledon of course, and the year before that Coventry City. In that mid to late 80s era the League Cup was won by Norwich City, Oxford United and Luton Town.
When I speak to fans from every one of the clubs I’ve listed apart from Leicester, it’s the cup triumph, not the league seasons, that form their most precious, proud, lifelong memory. That’s what cup wins do. The story belonged to the Crystal Palace fans.
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