Crystal Palace Fan View: Old Trafford trip anything but a dead rubber for us

Crystal Palace’s status as a Premier League club is assured thanks to our win over the freshly-doomed Hull City last weekend, but when I said that this weekend’s fixture in Manchester would be a procession that wasn’t quite the truth. While the battle for the top four remains wide open, the scrap at the less fashionable end of the table has been concluded with a week to spare. What hasn’t been concluded is the finishing positions and by extension, the prize money.

In a game that’s come to be dominated by large egos and even larger wages it’s perhaps crass to talk about the additional money the club could earn, especially when it certainly won’t translate to cheaper seats or subsidised pies at half time, but I’m going to anyway. The reason is that the ability to strengthen the squad, to improve the infrastructure of the stadium and the training ground requires one thing: the money to do it. We are a Premier League club looking to push onto the next level – we have to play the game, do the dance, to earn the money required to see our club achieve just that.

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The scenario facing Crystal Palace is this: unless Swansea score 20 goals on the final day, the worst we can do is finish 16th and the best case scenario is that we finish 11th. At £1.9million per place, that translates to a possible swing in prize money to the tune of nearly £10 million which, in a season where we’ve spent big in both windows, could make a big difference to our ability to spend in the summer.

Let me put that number in perspective. The potential swing of just under £10 million is almost as much as we turned over in the the entire year between 2010 & 2011, the first year under the consortium that stepped in to save the club. Thanks to the Carling Cup run the following season turnover rose astronomically to all of £15million, ironically thanks to beating Manchester United in the process…

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Returning to the football, the recurring theme in the last few weeks has been the injury situation. Unwilling to break with tradition, this week is no different.

Both Yohan Cabaye and Andros Townsend played through the pain barrier last weekend, to the point that neither of them made it to the end of the game and will subsequently miss out this weekend. James Tomkins was another player who put in a monumental shift against Hull after having only just returned from injury but thankfully for the back of our net, he will be fit to play at Old Trafford.

The absences of players like Cabaye & Townsend will open up opportunities for others and, encouragingly, it looks as if Allardyce is willing to look towards the youth team as an answer. In fact, Sam made all the right noises in his press conference during the week, talking about the need to ensure the injury crisis that has hit us is not repeated next season as well as the inclusion of the the youth players in pre-season.

Talking about the shortcomings of Alan Pardew would be as wise as bringing a bacon sandwich to a bar mitzvah so I’ll keep this brief, but his record of bringing players through at Crystal Palace was non-existent. Perhaps it’s the quality of the players – while our academy is lauded, primarily by Palace fans to be fair, there hasn’t been a sucessful graduate since Wilfried Zaha back in 2010. Jonny Williams has recently resurfaced after what I must presume was another low-key loan spell at Ipswich, but that is the closest we have come since Zaha first broke into the team and even Jonny broke through in 2012.

Hopefully Allardyce can prove this to be a turning point for the development players at Crystal Palace.

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