Eagles' ruffled feathers

It’s at times like these that I really regret our nickname. For subeditors it’s a heaven sent gift to be able to indulge in endless wordplay with Eagles, if it’s not “feathers ruffled” it’s “falls prey” and there’s always the classic “not so golden”. Those subs have been honing their fine art for a few months now as, after a succession of missed or late payments to the players, there was an inevitability over disappearing down the administration plughole.

Indeed the writing has been on the wall for a lot longer, when Simon “Tango skin” Jordan announced he wanted to get out of the club over a year ago, the only place we were heading to was the accountants’ offices, not the Premiership. Being a fan who fears the worst earlier in the season I had taken to deducting 10 points from our total and seeing where it left us in the table. Then I stupidly, naively stopped this practice as 2010 came along, thinking we’ve managed to sail through those choppy waters and now had arrived in a calmer environment.

So when my wife turned to me in the car and asked gravely whether I had been listening to the news recently, I feared another humanitarian disaster or some terrible terrorist act. Her sombre tones hung menacingly. “It’s Palace and it’s bad...” she tailed off but she did not need to go any further as I knew our fate at once. A ten point deduction was all that revolved around my aching brain and I returned to a mental calculation of the Championship table and saw us hovering just above the Plimsoll line.

It is quite a weird experience living in the post points docking world or PPD as it’s better known. Because suddenly, the teams you were worried about nicking the play-off place from their rightful owners are now over the hill and far away, and the radar has to be reset to the strugglers’ end of the table. So rather than fretting about Blackpool’s surge up the table, overnight that has become irrelevant and now Sheffield Wednesday’s renaissance is in the crosshairs.

But I managed to console myself that at least the timing of this draconian measure was ok. How much better it is to take it on the chin mid-season when you have a) a points tally to deduct from and b) there is time left in the season to repair some of the damage. So rather than face the start of the season playing catch-up or be docked at the end where there is no room for manoeuvre, we now just have a mountain to climb wearing slippers and a flimsy t-shirt. Brilliant.

To make matters worse if that is possible, I have been successfully luring my 8 year-old son into the ways of Selhurst Park. He knows that it’s a rollercoaster ride and there are bad days and then slightly less bad days but when I tried to explain to him the concept of administration and the finer points of the accountancy art (which to be fair is a slightly dark and mysterious one to me) he started to wince. Then when I had finished my meandering drivel on our financial and league position impoverishment, he looked at me wisely and summed it up in a few succinct words. “So we lost then.” I couldn’t have put it better myself and I tried.