Selhurst Park, home to the newly promoted Crystal Palace FC, will always be a curiously special place personally.
On annual trips into England to take in matches – typical planning means identifying as many contests around London as possible, just for ease of logistics – gritty little Selhurst Park was once a regular stop. Not for any particular reason; that’s just the way the schedule seemed to break.
But you don’t really care about that, do you? You can’t look like a proper authority on the English game based on that flimsy noodle of info.
Here, then are five things to know about Crystal Palace FC that will make you something of a thinly veiled expert. Feel free to spread these liberally at your next office water cooler gathering, or at happy hour with co-workers between bursts of office gossip about that new looker over in accounting.
- Liam Neeson is a fan! And a major one, apparently. The award winning leading man of Schindler’s List, the Star Wars series and a whole bunch of stuff was once a regular around Selhurst in South London. Former Rolling Stones bass man Bill Wyman is, too.
- Maybe you don’t know much about Kenny Sansom, but don’t you dare say a bad word about the fellow upon disembarking at the Selhurst stop out of Victoria Station. He’s a legend around there, having begun with Crystal Palace en route to 86 full England national team caps. Before overtaken by Ashley Cole, that was the most ever for an England fullback.
- Former English international Andy Johnson was The Man around South London for much of the last decade, a relatively unheralded arrival who went on to score 74 goals for Palace between 2002-2006. He left Everton on a transfer of about $13 million, a club record.
- Fellow South London sides Millwall and Charlton Athletic are two of the club’s chief rivals. Those are easy to figure, geography and all. But how did Brighton & Hove Albion, nowhere near South London in relative terms, emerge as Crystal Palace’s main rival? Here is a pretty good explanation. It’s long, but worth the read. And by the way, if “excrement incident” doesn’t say “fierce rival,” I don’t know what does.
- And finally, this craziness happened at Selhurst Park, one of the truly more bizarre incidents ever of English Soccer – and isn’t that covering lots of ground? In 1995, Eric Cantona attempted to flying Kung Fu kick a Crystal Palace fan. Yes. That happened. The Guardian called it The Kick that Stunned Football, and summed it up like this: “The most enigmatic, charismatic footballer in England aims the most shocking, unforgettable and undeniably glamorous kick of the decade.”
Here it is:
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