9

IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE

I HAD A serious conundrum after repeatedly asking managers to take on Steve Kember and Terry Bullivant as part of their structure. Now Trevor Francis had left, Kember was banging down my door for the top job.

I felt duty bound to give him a shot as he had always been overlooked in favour of someone who invariably failed to deliver. This was a classic case of ‘be careful what you wish for’.

Anyone looking for pearls of wisdom about recruiting managers from within should consider this. If players come out and say they like a certain coach and hope he gets a chance as manager the same players, by the very nature of their inadequate performances, will get him the sack sooner rather than later. As soon as an assistant manager or coach becomes the manager his relationship with the players radically changes. He is no longer their confidant or shoulder to cry on. He is the reason why they are not picked or don’t get something they think they are entitled to and the football graveyard is full of them.

My next challenge for the approaching season was Wayne Routledge. Our young and highly rated starlet was making quite a name for himself. He had just returned from a pre-season tour with England under-19s to rave reviews from the critics. But I was more concerned by what was going on off the pitch, and right under the eyes of the FA. I had heard disturbing things about young players being tapped up by other players’ parents on behalf of agents.

Wayne had made it into our first team at the tender age of seventeen. He was a product of my prized academy and someone I had watched come through the ranks since he was fourteen. I took a particular interest in Wayne’s development and also got to know his mother Sheila well. She was a single parent, and I made sure that the family’s needs were part of the equation in our handling of the player.

I gave him his first scholarship, his first pro contract and was instrumental in ensuring Trevor Francis gave him his first-team debut.

So imagine my utter disgust and fury when an agent called Paul Stretford phoned my secretary to advise her that I was to talk to him and no longer directly to the boy or his mother.

Stretford had got to Wayne whilst he was away with England. It was a disgrace that agents had access to young players while they were away on England duty and believe me, it was rife in the industry. This was another fine example of the FA, an organisation that was supposed to police football, who banged on about the crucial development of young players in the game but did bugger all to protect clubs against predatory agents. And people wondered why I had numerous altercations with them.

Stretford was just another of the agents that in my opinion operated when it suited them in a manner which ignored regulation. He became better known as the agent of another Wayne – Rooney – and in recent years his wrongful conduct got the attention it deserved with a substantial ban from the game.

In the instance of my Wayne, I refused to deal with Stretford, banned him from the training ground and the stadium and attempted to talk some sense into the ungrateful player and his mother. But despite my best efforts, it was ultimately a battle I was to lose.

During my time in football I worked tirelessly to reduce agents’ influence and expose them in their true light. It still bemuses me why the only people in football who pay nothing yet earn out of it are agents.

Football clubs pay League levies on gate receipts and transfer fees. Players pay membership fees to the PFA, broadcasters pay to broadcast and fans pay to watch.

And agents? They pay nothing. I believed there should be a levy put on agents’ fees that goes back into the football family, albeit a very dysfunctional one.

To my mind, on the whole most agents were little better than skin traders and it was incumbent on the football authorities to control this unnecessary evil that, in my view, served no greater good.

The Football League started to introduce regulations where clubs had to declare if an agent had been involved in a deal in a bid to eliminate the threat of agents getting paid by both the buying and selling clubs. Putting out strong guidelines was perhaps in no small way down to me regaling the media with my views on agents at every opportunity.

Back to the season in hand. The cash flow forecast for 2003–04 predictably did not make good reading for me. It showed I needed to put £9.5 million into the club just to stand still. This didn’t influence my decision to appoint Kember, but it did get me focused on stopping paying both big transfer fees and big wages for players.

Portsmouth had been promoted the previous season without paying big transfer fees and I figured that if we got it right we could replicate that.

I reshaped the management structure and brought in a new finance director to try and enhance the financial side of the business.

I also needed someone to assume control of the club on a day-to-day basis as I was based in Spain, fighting court cases and looking at other business projects.

The decision was between my brother Dominic and Phil Alexander, chief executive in title as a result of his fortuitous rise during administration. He was not a CEO in outlook or deliverability; he was a sales director.

So I decided to make Dominic vice-chairman so Phil didn’t lose face by being stripped of his title.

I didn’t appoint my brother out of nepotism but because he was the best person for the job. Dominic paid attention to detail and over the three years he had been at Palace had changed large aspects of the on-the-ground operation, eliminating all manner of abuse and upping standards across the business.

But Alexander and Dominic’s relationship was far from harmonious. Dominic had scant tolerance for Alexander’s lack-of-detail approach and Alexander resented reporting to him.

There were numerous explosive confrontations as Alexander resisted controls being put on him. I could see Alexander’s strong points, even if Dominic couldn’t. I wanted him focused on generating income and having grown tired of the arduous task of dealing with agents I put Phil in charge of transfers and sales, working to guidelines set by me.

Soon we saw the departure of Wimbledon from Selhurst Park and ultimately from football.

They went into administration in June 2003 and then controversially re-emerged as the MK Dons.

I was sad to see Charles Koppel, the Wimbledon chairman, a personal friend and close ally against all football bullshit, suffer such awful abuse from his own supporters.

The Wimbledon fans expected to get promoted or have success on crowds of 4,000 or less. Who was supposed to pay for that? The death threats and verbal abuse Charles suffered because he was proposing to move them to Milton Keynes to make them viable was unforgivable.

Wimbledon’s unfortunate demise had an unexpected benefit for us. At Kember’s request we took Neil Shipperley, a former Palace striker, on a free transfer from the administrators in lieu of charges they had to pay us for being a tenant.

One of the summer’s biggest announcements in football was the news that a certain Roman Abramovich had bought Chelsea and was to unleash spending power the like of which football had never witnessed before.

We had arranged a pre-season game against them before his arrival and therefore were the first English team to play the newly assembled Abramovich-fuelled Chelsea.

Trevor Birch, the chief executive of Chelsea who had been instrumental in bringing Abramovich in, allowed us to keep the entire gate receipts rather than the customary 50/50 split, which was a rare act of generosity in football.

In and around the time I was appointing Steve Kember, I received a phone call from Tony Adams, the ex-Arsenal and England captain, who wanted to become Palace’s new manager. It was a very strange phone call, as Tony seemed to have developed a very slow and deliberate way of speaking.

His delivery was very pronounced, littered with long words and parables of wisdom. It was not the Tony Adams I had met before but a new one, a highly educated philosopher of football, an Arsène Wenger protégé.

After I had removed the Friedrich Nietzsche book from his mouth and told him he had the square root of fuck all of a chance of managing at this level at this stage, the real Tony Adams emerged with a mouthful of expletives.

We then spoke in an honest fashion about football and I told him I was happy to give him a shot as Kember’s number two, learning his trade and then taking over in a few years.

That wasn’t good enough for our Tony. He was going to get a job in the Premier League or First Division.

I told him there was no way that would happen and eventually I believe he landed at League Two Wycombe Wanderers and I am pretty sure he was not an unqualified success there!

The pre-season came and went and there was a feeling of accord amongst players and management. The campaign had started with promise. We won our first three games and sat on top of the league. Everything looked rosy in the garden but along came the dog to piss on the roses.

Firstly Matt Clarke, our goalkeeper, was forced to retire, which was very sad for the lad and extremely costly for us. I had spent £1.25 million on him two years earlier and only got thirty-eight games from him. Fortunately he had an insurance policy to compensate him whereas we got nothing.

So we signed Thomas Myhre on loan from Sunderland, which proved to be very ironic, given what occurred at the end of the season.

I liked Kember and I wanted him to be successful. But everything was a joke for Steve and he had never really been under pressure. Stepping into the breach a couple of times and steadying the ship was vastly different from running it.

All of a sudden and inexplicably the wheels just came off.

We failed to record a win in seven games, taking only two points and dropping to twentieth in the table.

I tried to get Kember going but he was his usual happy-go-lucky self. It was clear that happy-go-lucky meant comfortable for players and it was not working.

The media vultures were circling overhead and the results kept on getting worse until we reached 1 November and played Wigan away in a televised game.

There I witnessed the worst performance of a Palace team for some time. I was a few minutes late and we were already 1–0 down.

As I got to my seat a woman steward shouted ‘tie’ at me and stopped me. As usual I was not wearing one. I said no thanks and she literally grabbed me and pushed one in my hands with the strict instruction to wear it.

I sat down next to Bullivant, watching us go down 2–0 after just thirty minutes. But what disturbed me most was the dire performance and complete lack of commitment from the players. So putting on a bleeding tie was the last thing on my mind.

Looking at Bullivant I asked what the hell was going on and his shrinking violet reaction told me he and Kember were lost.

Theo Paphitis phoned me and told me the TV cameras were on me every five minutes and I looked like I wanted to murder someone. Bullivant, probably, if I could have got away with it.

At half-time I went inside, forgetting the tie, and over came Nora bleeding Batty stewardess, who grabbed me and refused to let me in until I put the bloody tie on. I could hardly have a scuffle with her. By the size of her she would have probably beaten me up anyway. Northern charm at its finest!

The second half got even worse and we conceded a further three goals to lose 5–0.

Dave Whelan, the Wigan chairman, had made disparaging remarks about me a couple of years earlier when Steve Bruce left them to join Palace, so I avoided going in the boardroom. As the game finished I went to leave, passing Whelan, who stuck his hand out. When I shook it he said to me: ‘You must be very embarrassed, your team are pretty crap.’

I never forgot that. As I was learning all too frequently, in football your words often come back to haunt you. And they did for Whelan.

After this humiliating performance I felt I had nowhere to go and on the Monday, after maintaining radio silence for the weekend, I fired Steve Kember and Terry Bullivant.

After firing them I sauntered into the dressing room at the training ground, told Kit Symons what had happened and asked him to step in as a player-coach. He was very apprehensive and didn’t jump at the opportunity as I thought he would. Later on in the day he telephoned me in a far more positive mood and said he wanted the opportunity as long as he could bring in his own assistant manager, Stuart Gray, the former Southampton boss.

Clearly since we had spoken in the morning someone had spoken to Kit and urged him to take the opportunity.

I left him with the thought that I was grateful for him stepping in and that I was going to look for a manager but at this moment in time his hat was in the ring if he wanted it to be.

* * *

My relationship with Sarah Bosnich came to an end in November 2003, as I had no desire to settle down. That added to my good temper.

By now I had been a multi-millionaire for over three years. Instantaneous and significant wealth is something you have to learn to be comfortable with. It’s one thing being the owner of a business worth £75 million, another thing entirely when you have that worth sat in your own bank account.

You do change, but others around you change much more. People I had grown up with and known for years now treated me completely differently.

Everywhere you go people open doors for you and pretty soon you buy into all of that. Everything is first class and all of a sudden you stop checking bills because it doesn’t matter.

I had a £2.5 million penthouse in Chelsea, a £6 million villa in Marbella, a permanent suite at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane and a boat worth £2.5 million.

I flew everywhere by private jet, had fifteen luxurious cars, a wardrobe with over a hundred tailor-made suits and a full-time chauffeur.

I spent money as if it were going out of fashion, because I could, and because I was earning £40,000 in interest a week.

That said, owning a football club was making a big dent in my fortune. I was focused on achieving what I wanted with Palace but I also wanted other outlets for business. I had set up the magazine Octane, tried to buy the TV production company Planet Rapido and looked at all manner of other investments.

And all this time I lived a life of decadence. Whatever I wanted, I bought.

What I’m trying to get at here was that it wasn’t about being rich or flash. Not quite.

What I had was irreverence towards money. It was the end product of success and was not the thing that motivated me. Having money was fantastic but if you were not careful it took away desire and hunger and replaced it with ego and falseness.

With a smoke-and-mirrors business like football you could become detached from the things that made you successful and then believe the things you read about yourself in papers and magazines and on TV.

All of a sudden you could become a caricature of yourself.

After a few years of vitriol between myself and Ron Noades, the former owner of Palace and – in my opinion – the undeserving owner of Selhurst Park, I tried to come to a deal to buy the stadium. Noades was open to sell, the only problem was he wanted double what it was worth, £12 million. Over lunch I tried to reach some form of agreement. As one American president said: ‘We do not negotiate with terrorists.’ I should have taken this advice, I felt like I was dealing with one. Of course I’m joking, but Noades would not budge.

I offered £9 million, then £10 million, which was already massively higher than the £6.4 million valuation, but he would not move. I endured lunch with this tiresome man trying to find a deal whilst listening to his opinions of how I should run the football club. Eventually I said I would give him £10 million, plus a further £3 million if/when we got promoted to the Premier League, thus a million more than he wanted. The response was no and, as a final insult, he said I would never get Palace promoted. That was the last conversation I was to have with that man.

Whilst Kit was setting up for his new role I was searching for my sixth manager.

Tony Finnegan, an agent and friend of Ian Wright’s, suggested Stan Ternent, the Burnley manager.

I asked Wrighty about Stan and he was glowing about him as he had played for him under Coppell in 1990 when Ternent was first-team coach.

Ternent was a tough northerner whose management style was no nonsense, forthright and upfront. No, let’s not dress it up, he was aggressive and he stood no nonsense from players. The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea.

The press were doing the usual uninformed speculation about who the next manager would be, running all kinds of names.

The one they kept harping on about was Peter Taylor, from Hull City. He was a former Palace player and had previously shown interest when we had the vacancy in the summer after Trevor had gone. I never fancied Taylor, considering him to be a coach not a manager. With press speculation being rife, I decided to phone Adam Pearson, the Hull chairman, and let him know I had no interest in Taylor, so one Saturday I phoned Pearson and left a message on his voicemail, asking him to call me back. Unfortunately, he got the wrong end of the stick and called me, raging on my voicemail that I was phoning him about his manager on match day. I phoned him back and left a very curt message. Eventually we cleared up the misunderstanding, but three years later there was to be no such misunderstanding around Taylor.

I met Stan Ternent in my suite at the Grosvenor with his agent and his assistant manager Sam Ellis. He was very cocky and it felt like he wanted to talk down to me a little, as he was much older and more experienced in football. Like most people he had preconceived notions of me. I mentioned I considered him to be a strong independent man who had ‘bollocks’ and was not intimidated by anyone and made his own decisions and stood by them. So why then, I asked, did he need his hand held by his agent and assistant manager to speak to little old me, who was on my own? He clearly had enjoyed listening to me praise him, but the last bit caught him on the hop and after being thrown, he came back guns blazing and I liked him.

Meanwhile, Kit had taken his first two games and got noteworthy draws but I was still in the frame of mind to shake things up. I was fed up with players taking the piss and underperforming and constantly having to sack managers and pay them off.

So I decided to offer Ternent the job and phoned Finnegan and said I was prepared to offer him the same salary as Trevor Francis, £320,000 a year, and once agreed I would approach Burnley.

Barely an hour had passed and Finnegan was back on the phone.

‘Stan says bollocks, it’s not enough money.’

At first I thought he was joking but quickly it became apparent he was not. That pissed me off as Ternent had specifically told me it was not about money, it was about opportunity, and he believed Palace offered him that.

Suddenly it was all about money. I had offered him top dollar, but he still wanted more. So I pulled out and said to Finnegan, ‘If it’s all about money let’s just leave it.’

I barely had time to put the phone down when Ternent came on the line.

‘Chairman, you are making a big fucking mistake. I know more about football than you will ever know. This is a huge opportunity you are missing out on. You’re going to regret this.’

He sounded like he was half-cut.

‘OK, Stan, interesting way to resign from a job you haven’t got, but let’s leave it, shall we?’ and I put the phone down.

I had quite fancied having him, but he had just turned out to be a bit of a clown.

But it was to get worse. I was going to meet Theo Paphitis at Millwall’s ground to go out for dinner and on the way there Ternent left me a series of messages, each one worse than the last. When I got to Millwall I played them from my voicemail to Theo, who was incredulous and we all burst out laughing.

Clearly Ternent was drinking, the last message, left in a broad Lancashire accent, was ‘Chairman, I am fooking great and you are fooking shit. I have got a fooking Bentley and a fooking Mercedes. You have made a big mistake. You haven’t got the bollocks to answer my calls so fook your job.’

I phoned him back. He didn’t answer so I left a message. ‘Stan, thanks for your insightful commentary. The next time you apply for a job you might want to stay out of the pub whilst talking to your potential new chairman. Anyway, well done. Enjoy your next port and lemon, you buffoon.’

I also interviewed Neil Warnock at that time and had grown to like him a lot. We had a little bit of handbags in my first year when Neil had floated a mischievous rumour that we were selling Clinton Morrison and taking Marcus Bent in exchange, and giving them a million on top, a rumour that was designed to unsettle young Morrison and had annoyed me.

He had all the characteristics I wanted and we had become friends during my early tenure at Palace. He came to London and I interviewed him in my penthouse flat on Chelsea Bridge. We got on very well and he liked our squad but decided he wanted to try and finish what he had started at his beloved Sheffield United. We kept in touch over the years and were to have our time later.

Kit had got the team into some semblance of order with three draws and a win in his first four games.

But I was still looking to bring in a manager. I decided to bring Terry Bullivant back into the fold as a special football adviser to me with the brief to go and find me a manager. Terry knew me very well and knew what I wanted and expected. We were inundated with applicants and Bullivant was interviewing around the country.

Two people phoned me direct who I didn’t want to see, Steve Cotterill and Iain Dowie. Cotterill just annoyed me because he was so persistent and I am sorry to admit that I couldn’t take his West Country accent seriously.

Dowie left me his résumé on my voicemail and I thought people who do that are convincing themselves, rather than me, of their capabilities.

Kit hit the buffers a little, losing three games in a row. At a social function I made an observation about how poorly Dougie Freedman was playing and perhaps Kit should consider dropping him. It was an observation, not an order.

But later that evening he was quite off with me, saying he was not going to be told who to pick.

Phil Alexander told me that he had overheard the assistant Stuart Gray saying you can’t have a chairman telling you what to do and Kit had listened to this bad, out-of-context advice and acted upon it. In that moment Kit Symons ruled himself out of any serious consideration for the job, not because he took exception to my advice but because he took an antiquated attitude towards an owner’s ability to make comments.

Bullivant was interviewing numerous candidates and bringing back dossiers on each applicant. After three weeks of interviews we had a number of candidates but Bullivant was absolutely adamant that the stand-out person was Iain Dowie and despite my reservations I agreed to see him.

Dowie apparently had a degree in rocket science and interviewed well for a football manager. He was professional, articulate and prepared. He had done his homework and had hunger and desire; he also had produced a report on the club, one at the time I thought was very impressive and unique. The ability to write such a report helped him get the job with me, but was to prove very unhelpful to him later on in a very different environment.

It didn’t take me long to decide that he was right for the job. He was on his way out of Oldham as they were struggling in administration so he was free and clear to join Palace.

When it came to the terms I only offered him a short-term contract of eighteen months. I didn’t want to get caught out with another substantial pay-out to a manager who failed to deliver.

I also set down a salary much lower than Messrs Bruce and Francis had enjoyed.

Iain wanted to discuss his salary and I refused to negotiate. My offer was take it or leave it. Dowie was taken aback by this but agreed. This impressed me, as he was backing himself on what he had said, which few managers do. I now believe that in actual fact he harboured resentment towards the offer, which would manifest itself at a later stage.

We were scheduled to play Reading away live on Sky TV on Saturday evening. I finalised the deal with Dowie on the Wednesday and decided not to announce the appointment until the following Monday. After weighing it up, I also decided to tell Kit after the Reading game.

My primary concern was that we needed to get a result at Reading. The papers were speculating that Dowie had the job so when I arrived at the Reading ground the busy Phil Alexander had spoken to Kit, who was aware of the rumours and was very down.

Alexander suggested that I should speak to Kit before the match, and I made a decision against my gut feeling, one that attracted infamy.

I went to see Symons and suggested we had a chat. Given the dressing room was busy we had to go outside as there was nowhere else to go. No one was in the tunnel area so I decided to have a conversation with Kit at the bottom of the step below the line of the pitch, and out of eye and earshot – or so I thought.

To this day people like Chris Kamara who covered the game for Sky maintain they heard the conversation. I accept they may have been unbeknownst to me able to see as the cameras were below the line of the pitch. But there was no way they could have heard what was said; otherwise their condemnation of my actions wouldn’t have been so definitive.

The Symons conversation went like this:

‘Clearly I can’t legislate for rumours and press speculation but I have made a decision and I will be bringing in Iain Dowie.’

Kit was not surprised but was disappointed. ‘Fucking hell, chairman, that’s great. I thought you were going to tell me and give me the courtesy, I am fucking well owed that.’

I interrupted him. ‘Hold on, Kit, I gave you an opportunity to gain some invaluable experience, experience you can’t buy and it will probably be good for you in the future.

‘I said that I would tell you when I had made a decision and only on Wednesday did I agree with Dowie and only yesterday did I tie up his contract.

‘So the first opportunity I would have had to have told you was last night and up until walking in the stadium it was my intention to tell you at the first practical moment, which would have been after the game.’

Kit snapped. ‘That’s fucking great, chairman. I get you out of the cart and you show me no respect.’

‘You got me out of the cart? Let’s not forget, Kit, you were one of the fucking players that put me in the cart, as you put it, in the first place.

‘I gave you an opportunity and am grateful for your help. I have made a decision to go with Dowie.’

Kit started to protest a little more but I stopped him in mid-sentence as I could sense he was going to say something that would be very damaging for him.

‘Kit, do yourself a favour. Let’s leave it there and not say anything else, because you never know what may happen next.’

I walked away, as I had earmarked Kit Symons to be Dowie’s number two, and Kit calling me all kind of names would have made it difficult for me to make that appointment.

On getting back to the boardroom I saw that Chris Kamara and his Sky colleagues were replaying the footage that had been shot without my knowledge. I was coming in for some very heavy criticism, which would continue the next morning on Goals on Sunday, the programme hosted by Chris Kamara, with one of the guests, Chris Coleman, a Welsh teammate and close friend of Kit Symons, going on about how out of order I was.

We beat Reading emphatically 3–0, and at the end of the match Dowie phoned me and jokingly said did I still want him to come in on Monday.

Dowie did come in on Monday and Kit Symons did become his number two, thus starting another era with another manager. Iain Dowie was given the same remit as those who preceded him: promotion to the Premier League.

Despite being nineteenth in the league, in the press conference announcing Dowie’s appointment I said I still felt promotion wasn’t beyond us. It caused a degree of mirth amongst the journalists and the first questions were to Dowie about unrealistic expectations and pressure.

Dowie performed admirably in this press conference, upright, forthright, full of confidence, knew his challenge and was up for it.

I was heartened as his words were exactly what I wanted to hear from my new leader and if his actions matched the words there was cause for renewed optimism.

Dowie’s first game, as chance would have it, was home to Millwall, a year to the month since the last time we had played my old mate Paphitis’s rotten old rabble and beaten them.

Dowie was given a hero’s reception by the fans, but we proceeded to lose 1–0 and I found Theo had plenty of time to hang around in my boardroom relishing the victory to my ear and bar cost.

Not only that but Paphitis and I had a bet on the result. The forfeit for the losing chairman was to wear the opposing team’s mascot’s costume in the return fixture. So now I had to wear Millwall’s Zampa the Lion’s get-up and run around the New Den. Of course this was a fact my close personal friend kept to himself by referring to it in his programme notes week after week leading up to the fixture.

I had made a bet and was fully prepared to honour it, but a few weeks before the game he offered me a get out of jail card. If I matched what the Millwall fans raised for a testicular cancer charity – their long-serving centre forward Neil Harris had recently suffered from it – I wouldn’t have to wear the outfit. ‘No thanks,’ I replied, ‘a bet’s a bet.’ Theo then explained the real reason for his kind face-saving gesture: they had reliable information that certain segments of their charming fan base were really looking forward to my appearance as Zampa, so much so they intended to bring washing-up bottles filled with petrol to squirt at me before setting me on fire, so it was a little bit more like a death sentence. Needless to say I took up Theo’s offer. Their normally tight-fisted fans raised over £5,000, which I matched. So I sent our mascot ‘Pete the Eagle’ to present a big cheque on the pitch before one of their games, not that that stopped the ever-charming Millwall fans giving me barrel loads of abuse when we played them next.

In December 2003, as well as installing another new manager at Palace to achieve my dream of getting into the Premier League, I made the first inroads into fulfilling another one.

For a while now I had a vision of re-forming the iconic band The Specials, my favourite group.

After doing months of research I had arranged to meet my hero Terry Hall, the former lead singer of The Specials and Fun Boy Three, with his manager at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

I had tracked Terry down via Alan McGee, the founder of Creation Records, who looked after Oasis.

He put me on to Steve Blackwell, Terry’s manager. Steve was an Aston Villa fan and coincidentally we had just played them in the cup at Villa Park, where I had met ‘Deadly’ Doug Ellis, the Villa chairman, who I took a great liking to. He was a character, he even let me smoke my cigar in his boardroom, with the words, ‘You have broken every other rule in football, you may as well break another.’ So this gave myself and Steve something to talk about.

We spent two hours talking. This was a band that had barely spoken for nearly twenty-four years. Terry and I became firm friends, as we remain today. He knew that I had this massive passion and said to me, ‘We need someone like you to pull us together.’

In the early part of 2004 I left no stone unturned to re-form this band. Everybody told me it was impossible to get them back together. I met some of the Madness boys who told me no way.

I got every band member’s phone number and set about calling them. I tracked Jerry Dammers down and arranged to meet him.

Jerry was the founder member of The Specials, and also the founder of Two-Tone, the label. He was also a bloody nutcase. I met him in the Grosvenor. He was a hero of mine, a musical genius who by now reminded me of something from Middle Earth, all long beard and no teeth.

Jerry was very strange and very contradictory.

In one breath he stated categorically that The Specials would never re-form and in the next he was curious to understand what I might pay.

I left my first meeting with Jerry none the wiser but all the more determined.

I worked with Steve Blackwell to put together a financial plan to show the members of the band what could be available to them should they re-form.

I eventually made contact with all of them. Some were very pleased to hear from me and others, like John Bradbury, were downright rude.

I did an interview with the Evening Standard, announcing my passion for the band and how I wanted to re-form them, which created a lot of interest. The headline read ‘Too Much Too Young’, the title of one of the band’s most famous songs and a sly wink at my age as a football club owner.

Bit by bit things started to take shape. I had a vision of putting The Specials on at Selhurst Park and I tried to buy their back catalogue. I also put a formal contract in front of Jerry Dammers offering £1 million if the band re-formed.

* * *

I put The Specials and that dream to the back of my mind for a bit and got on with more pressing matters. Iain Dowie brought one member of staff with him, John Harbin, the fitness coach. He was a middle-aged Australian and more than just a fitness coach he was Iain’s confidant and, in some instances, mentor.

Harbin was a fantastic man with a rugby background. He had no interest in the nonsense of football and footballers. He just went about the business of changing players’ mind-sets.

He was absolutely vital to Dowie. Without Harbin there would have been no success, he was that important.

Dowie walked out in his second game away to Ipswich Town like a man who had a sense of his own destiny. Ipswich were fourth in the league and going well. I watched him, chest pumped out, striding down the side of the pitch. Palace were outstanding, winning 3–1 and looking like a side that was on the up.

In the next four and a half months I was to see the team I financed finally fulfil my expectations. The only problem was under Dowie I found the whole experience an anti-climax. He was very difficult to get on with. It was as if he was in a competition with me.

His father was a trade union leader, which came as no surprise to me.

He always went looking for an argument or was rude and disrespectful on the telephone.

Whenever that telephone conversation resulted in me suggesting he should come to see me, a completely different person would turn up, apologetic and contrite. I suspected that was the calming influence of John Harbin.

After all the campaigning for Dowie by Terry Bullivant, his reward from Dowie was to be completely marginalised and left out in the cold to such an extent that Terry decided it was best he leave Palace. There you are, football at its finest: loyalty and respect non-existent.

During the January transfer window Dowie made two signings: Mark Hudson, a centre back on loan from Fulham, and Mikele Leigertwood on a permanent deal from Wimbledon. We also took Birmingham’s reserve goalkeeper Nico Vaesen on a three-month loan and this time the opportunistic sods got really lucky …

Despite the growing dislike I was developing for Iain I still gave him my luxurious penthouse on Chelsea Bridge to live in.

I wanted to try and get along with him but in the end I just thought it wasn’t worth it and left him to get on with his job.

What was not open to debate was the effect he was having on the team. In his first ten games he took twenty-two points, title-winning form in any league.

We had jumped from nineteenth to ninth, two points off a play-off spot, spearheaded by the unbelievable goal scoring of Andy Johnson. There were some fabulous performances: 6–3 at home to Stoke, 5–1 away to Watford and 3–0 away to Neil Warnock’s Sheffield United.

That particular performance really meant something, not because Neil had turned us down, but because Sheffield United were a benchmark team for me. They had an indomitable spirit, but we took them to pieces and totally destroyed their resolve to the point that Sheffield virtually gave up, which was something I had never seen from a Warnock team.

At that moment I believed we could actually go and get promoted. I had said it for nigh on four years and now I could sense it coming to pass.

Football was now show business, the players were the rock stars of the noughties. Highly paid and very high profile, they had gone from being solely on the back page of the papers to being front-page news. Most teams had their fair share of celebrity supporters and Palace had theirs: Bill Wyman, Bill Nighy, Ronnie Corbett, Timothy Spall, Jo Brand, Neil Morrissey, Eddie Izzard, Nigel Harman to name a few. One that sticks out in my memory was a Hollywood superstar, who telephoned me out of the blue to attend a game.

I was sitting in Spain, minding my own business, when my mobile phone rang and this softly spoken Irish voice came on the line telling me who it was and asking if he could come to the game on Saturday against Norwich and would it be OK if he brought his son. Not believing who it was, I passed him off to my secretary to get some tickets and promptly put it down as a bit of a crank call and forgot all about it.

So imagine my surprise when I walked into my boardroom on Saturday and was greeted by the lead actor in Schindler’s List and the new Star Wars film. Liam Neeson was a big Palace fan. His best friend lived in Stockwell, a fellow actor who had supported Palace, and had introduced a young Liam to the club when he moved to London from Ireland. He was a charming man, who described it as an honour to be in the boardroom, looking at all the pots and pans in our trophy cupboard, I tried to reconcile in my mind who had the honour here as standing in front of me was one of the world’s best actors.

There was a more disturbing side to footballers’ fame when in late 2003, staying in my London home the Grosvenor House Hotel, I walked into the famous red bar for my customary gin and tonic and saw a group of footballers in the bar. They saw me too and promptly made themselves scarce, probably realising I was likely to know their club’s chairman. That was the last I saw of them until the next morning, when one of the doormen from the Grosvenor told me about a controversial set of allegations surrounding some footballers about a sexual act that had come to be known as ‘roasting’. Apparently this term had been coined by certain players.

So imagine my horror when the only person named in an article written by the Sun regarding these serious and somewhat distasteful allegations was myself, reporting that I had been seen in the bar when the players were there. Quite why I was mentioned I don’t know, but it was later brought to my attention that certain players who were there believed that I had talked to the press, which I most certainly had not, as I had no knowledge or interest in what those players got up to. Later on, when we tried to sign Carlton Cole on loan from Chelsea when we went up to the Premier League, he wouldn’t sign for us, apparently because the chairman had ‘grassed them up’.

During this period of games we played Stan Ternent’s Burnley and I made a point of being around the dressing room area as Ternent had said some inflammatory things to me on the phone and via other people. So I made sure I was there for him to say the same to my face.

When he emerged from the dressing room, I said: ‘Nice to see you sober, Stan.’

He went for me and the stewards had to get in front of him as he tried to swing a punch at me.

I just laughed. To be fair on him, several months later after we got promoted I got a letter from Stan, saying I had got it right and apologising for his behaviour. And with that I changed my mind about Stan Ternent and whenever I saw him at games from then on we always got on well.

As the team was going into the ascendency my relations with the media reached an all-time low. For four years I had been very open and accessible but I felt that in the last year certain factions had gone from taking a professional perspective to personal attacks. Some of the drivel that was written about me was just unnecessary, especially that written by the local and London press.

I had gone out of my way over the years to give these guys the best access, as I believed it was good form to give preference to them, and they repaid me by being snide, commenting more on my appearance and my personal life than on the performance of my team.

In the end I tired of this. The London Evening Standard was the main culprit. I had enough and banned them, remarking at the time that if they wanted to write crap about my club and me then they could do it from outside the ground and not whilst they were sitting in my stadium eating my biscuits.

I also decided that I would withdraw from talking to all forms of the media as I thought Sky had said some crappy things as well, always highlighting the negative and never praising the positive. I thought I would let the team do the talking, which was quite good timing, given we were doing so well.

Rather than the Evening Standard sports editor calling me to see what was wrong, he had the arrogance to phone the MD of our shirt sponsor, Churchill Insurance, saying that I had banned them from covering games and suggested that they were losing coverage and should reduce the money they spent with the club.

When I found out who the editor was I phoned him and asked him what he thought he was doing. He told me that his paper made our football club and helped the team succeed and win games.

‘Are you bloody mad? You report events, you don’t influence them.’

He actually believed what he was saying. I mean, people say I know about arrogance but this guy’s behaviour was off the charts. Rather than calm things down he made things ten times worse.

Now I was incandescent and continued the ban, only relenting towards the end of the season. But I decided never to speak to that paper again and I never did. Whatever they wrote in the future concerning me never had one direct quote from me.

By the way, the editor was a guy called Simon Greenberg who became the communications director of football at Chelsea Football Club. After departing Stamford Bridge he then became part of England’s ‘successful’ bid team to stage the 2018 World Cup.

The next four games saw us hit a blip, taking just four points and dropping down to twelfth and nine points off the play-offs.

I went to see Millwall play Sunderland in the FA Cup semi-final at Old Trafford to support Theo Paphitis and his rabble, now managed by Dennis Wise – or Napoleon, as we called him.

Dennis had come to speak to me at Palace after leaving Leicester in, shall we say, less than auspicious circumstances.

I met him with Trevor Francis and it looked as if we were going to take him when Trevor had a dramatic change of heart and Dennis went and joined Millwall.

Sometime later I bumped into Wise and he claimed Trevor had called him and said he wanted to sign him but the chairman – i.e., me – had blocked the deal. Strange that, as I had done no such thing. This was just another case of Francis not wanting to deliver bad news, I suspect.

Talking of Leicester, around this time, Leicester City under Micky Adams were having a mid-season break in La Manga, Spain, when some of their players got themselves into a serious situation and several of them were arrested and held over alleged sexual offences. Phil Smith, the agent, phoned me. One of his players Paul Dickov was amongst them and Phil wanted some help. He knew I lived in Spain and fortunately for him and Paul, it turned out my lawyer was related to the district judge in the province they were arrested in. Phil explained it was a case of mistaken identity: the girls involved were prostitutes and the footballers had been set up.

The Spanish authorities were not planning to release them until they were arraigned, which could take some time. I reached out through my lawyers and got these players released from prison and allowed to return to the UK, where the matter was resolved. I liked Paul Dickov as a player and trusted what Phil Smith had told me, which was later borne out to be true, but getting them out of Spain was very important for justice to be served. Dickov’s wife Jan phoned me and thanked me, as did the player himself. Later, when I signed Paul, he never quite did it for me, despite promising me he would as he owed me a huge favour. But as is so often the case with players: they never pay their dues.

I watched Millwall reach the FA Cup Final and, as thrilled as I was for Theo, our loss of form at a critical point in the season left me thinking that I might be denied my day in the sun.

I underestimated Dowie’s resilience as we won six and drew one out of our next seven games, beating two teams, West Ham and Sunderland, who were to appear in our immediate future.

In one of those seven games I jokingly prayed for Andrew Johnson not to score a goal, as by this time his prolific goal scoring during this season had put him on £7,500 a goal.

He scored a hat trick against Crewe, giving him a £22,500 goal bonus for one game, and when we got a penalty I was actually screaming for someone else to take it. It was a bit silly, really, as winning that game was critical for our play-off ambitions. He took the penalty, and scored.

Our last game was away to Coventry. If we won we were in the play-offs; if we lost and Wigan won, we were not. Unbelievably, Coventry tore us to pieces and we were 2–0 down in the first half – and it could have been five.

In the second half we were slightly better but still lost. By then news had filtered through that Wigan were winning 1–0. Just as we thought we were out, Brian Deane headed an equaliser for West Ham in the dying minutes, thus putting Wigan out and us in the play-offs. It was a goal that was to prove fateful for West Ham, and one I had to listen about from Brian Deane every summer I bumped into him in Marbella from then on.

Personally, I couldn’t have been happier for Wigan and Whelan. After all – fancy losing a play-off spot to a crap team!

Behind the scenes, I had been working for some six months with Investec, a big financial company, on a deal to restructure Palace.

I had agreed a deal in principle for £15 million, which would help the hugely under-pressure finances of Palace and me personally, given pursuit of my ambition was very costly and we had forecasted losing £9.5 million this year alone.

Having run the club for four years with significant personal investment – from rebuilding the playing squad and the academy to buying the training ground to improving the stadium – this deal was the light at the end of the bleak tunnel we had been traipsing through since the collapse of ITV Digital.

As well as all this I was still pushing on The Specials front and had now spoken to all the members of the band. Pretty much five out of the original seven were on side with the idea of re-forming, although I suspect there was still a degree of scepticism amongst them.

I spent a lot of time with Terry and Steve Blackwell. Terry was concerned that nobody wanted to see them and they had long since been forgotten. I told him in no uncertain terms how wrong he was.

Jerry, though, was still very resistant so when I was invited to do Soccer A.M. with Tim Lovejoy, who I knew to be a huge Specials fan, I took Terry along with me to talk about them and make it public knowledge that there was a will within certain members of the group.

I took Terry with me by helicopter to the FA Cup Final, as he was a huge Manchester United fan. Manchester United ran out 3–0 winners but I was disappointed for Theo. I felt that this Cup Final was as much about his achievement as a chairman, taking Millwall from the brink of the abyss to a new stadium, play-offs for the Premier League and now an FA Cup Final, and he never really got the recognition he deserved. No wonder Theo became so disillusioned in the end and got out.

We had drawn Sunderland in the play-offs by virtue of the fact we had finished sixth and they had finished third.

The excitement leading up to the game was enormous and we sold out very quickly.

I was not nervous going into the game as I believed I had solved the financial problems, and the play-offs and potential promotion to the Premier League were all upsides for me.

The only thing that had infuriated me was that Birmingham got to do it to me again: they said they wouldn’t extend Nico Vaesen, the goalkeeper we had on loan from them, unless we paid them £50,000 if we won the play-off semi-final and a further £200,000 if we got promoted to the Premier League.

Talk about victims of our own success. I had no real choice, so through gritted teeth I agreed to the legitimised blackmail.

On the evening of the game I called my directors into my office, wanting to have a drink with them as this had been a very difficult season. We had all worked hard on a number of financial and logistical initiatives and were on the cusp of something really special.

As we were having this drink together my phone rang. Lisa my PA put through the MD of Investec. He was phoning from the States, seemingly unaware of his timing, to tell me that the £15-million deal we had agreed – the deal I had considered of significant importance for the club – was off.

I couldn’t believe it. Without letting on that something had troubled me, I asked the directors to excuse me for a minute.

I tried to establish the reason why, but the MD could only apologise. The deal had fallen through minutes before the biggest game in my four years of ownership of the club.

I had spent six months working on this deal and had exhausted all other avenues for finance. Outside the Premier League the only game in town had been Investec and now that was gone.

For some reason despite this dire news I was philosophical. I literally sighed and thought, ‘Let’s hope we win tonight.’

I always stood at home games and this habit never changed during all my years of ownership. I was very reactionary, and when something I didn’t like happened in the game I would disappear down the stairs and out of the view of the crowd to express my frustrations. Poor Stephanie, the boardroom hostess, would be greeted with me coming into the boardroom effing and jeffing.

As I was waiting for the teams to come out, Alan Smith, my first manager, walked past me to take his seat and said, ‘I bet you are shitting yourself.’

‘Nice,’ I thought.

It was a great game in which we ran out 3–2 winners. After we had gone behind, as was the norm for the season, Andrew Johnson scored, taking his total to thirty-two goals for the season and somewhere in the region of £150,000 in goal bonuses alone.

We had played Sunderland a few times over the last few years and their chairman Bob Murray and board of directors were not the friendliest and most welcoming people.

When they had been in the Premier League and drawn us in the Cup they had been downright inhospitable and rude.

After an exciting match the fans had invaded the pitch and, in front of the section containing the Sunderland fans, taunted them with their celebrations. Immediately, Dominic and I went out and physically got the 200 or so exuberant fans off the pitch. I’m not sure how many other chairmen would have gone onto a pitch to send off overzealous fans.

It didn’t stop my old pals the FA fining the club £15,000. These arbitrary fines annoyed me intensely and when we appealed they simply upheld the original decision and then, to add insult to injury made the fine bigger!

The second leg was on the Monday in Sunderland.

This was a massive moment in my ownership, yet I was still very relaxed.

But at half-time we were 2–0 down after dominating the match and seemingly on our way out. Yet for some reason I still had a serene feeling of calm.

In the second half we plugged away but Julian Gray got sent off, thus reducing us to ten men, and with barely a minute left to play we were dead and buried.

Or so I thought.

From a corner and with the inevitable whistling from the Sunderland fans to put intimidating pressure on the referee to blow the final whistle, substitute Darren Powell headed home.

The goal should never have stood as Neil Shipperley committed virtual GBH on their goalkeeper.

Extra time came and went and we now faced a penalty shootout.

Yet despite the magnitude of this moment I remained composed.

Before the penalties were taken I snuck out for a cigarette with my brother and just sort of sighed with a ‘what will be, will be’ shrug.

I sat there in the Stadium of Light, watching the penalty shoot-out, which could literally change the immediate direction of my future and finances.

The order escapes me as far as penalties were concerned but it turned out that on three separate occasions we had a penalty to score that would enable us to win.

I watched the players in the centre circle and I remember young Wayne Routledge at seventeen being sent up to take a penalty, thinking how could players much older and more experienced than him put him under so much pressure.

Of course when he did, he missed. Eventually Michael Hughes, probably the most experienced player on the pitch, walked up from the centre circle like a man heading towards the gallows.

That walk seemed like a lifetime before he stepped up and scored and put Palace into the play-off final, the ‘richest game in the world’.

I remember celebrating and also trying to be magnanimous with the Sunderland directors.

My phone went red-hot and I answered call after call, then I got one from Freddy Shepherd, the Newcastle United chairman, who couldn’t stop laughing.

When he did he wanted me to pass the phone to the Sunderland chairman Bob Murray, which of course I would not do. Well, I might have if Murray had been at the game, such was the rivalry in the north-east.

As far as Shepherd was concerned I had made his year and if we were out in Newcastle our money was no good.

For the play-off final we drew the smaller end of the Millennium Stadium with an allocation of 34,000, which sold out in six days.

We booked the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel in Cardiff. This was the lucky hotel and no one who had stayed there had lost since the play-offs had been staged in Cardiff since 2000.

Our opponents, West Ham United, had missed a trick there, but as the twelve days leading up to the monumental game went past it appeared they were relaxed about most things. The vibe coming from their end was that they believed that the final was a foregone conclusion.

I flew to Spain, preferring to be out of the way of the media scrum leading up to the play-off final, staying in Spain until Friday 28 May, the day before the game.

On the Thursday night before the final we had a corporate event.

It was a sporting dinner, hosting 500 Palace fans who came to dine and be entertained by a variety of entertainers and after-dinner speakers.

This year the compères for the after-dinner speeches were Alan Brazil and Mike Parry, the hosts of the talkSPORT radio station.

As the play-off final was only two days away there would have been extreme optimism in the room, so what followed was doubly outrageous.

Onstage, Parry and Brazil unleashed a tirade of abuse about Crystal Palace and ridiculed the club’s chances of beating West Ham in the play-off final.

Understandably the audience became quite agitated and restless. Dominic was overseeing the event and was listening to these two idiots – who were being paid by the club – stand up and be derogatory. He was concerned that the audience were getting inflamed but it didn’t stop Parry and Brazil, who singled me out for some special attention.

Eventually Dominic got security to remove them from the stage fearing a riot was about to break out. They were shepherded out of the marquee and into the boardroom.

Dominic phoned me in Spain, told me what was going on and said that he had removed them from the stage before things got very ugly.

I was relaxed about it, probably because I was detached from it. I told Dom not to lose his head, and to try and control the situation. Once in the boardroom, rather than the situation being defused, Parry appeared to want to inflame it all the more. Dominic asked them what right they had to be so abusive. Why would they come into our place of business and insult the club, its supporters and its owner?

He was greeted with the response, ‘Fetch us a drink, son.’ Dominic called them a cab and had them removed.

I have never found out why they chose to behave this way, I had had no real dealings with either one of them. Perhaps it was a case of people forming opinions of you without even having met you, which is often the way in football. Unfortunately they chose not to leave it there, and on their radio show the next day they broadcasted the fact that my brother and some other goons working for me had manhandled them out of a corporate event for no reason.

Meanwhile, I was travelling back to England from Spain. It was the day before the game.

I had friends flying from all over the world to watch this game and my mood was still very good, despite the previous evening’s events.

As I boarded the flight I decided to pick up a bunch of the morning’s papers. I was looking through them in the airport lounge when I turned to an article written by a journalist called John Cross from the Daily Mirror.

It was a full-page spread titled something like ‘Palace Players in Bonus Crisis’. The article described how on the eve of the play-off final the Crystal Palace team were in disarray as the owner – i.e. me – had refused to pay the players their well-earned bonuses. As a result, the club was in apparent turmoil and some players were refusing to play.

This was all news to me. It was a piece of malicious reporting on the part of a journalist who I had had run-ins with before. Irrespective of whether the article was wrong or right – and believe me, it was wrong – the timing of it on the Friday before the play-off final was designed to destabilise the club before this game.

Now I was agitated. A pair of buffoons taking the piss out of the club was one thing, but it was something entirely different when a national newspaper decided to print an article full of untruths and misrepresentations. I hadn’t spoken to the media for the best part of six months and on the eve of this game I had this.

I was on the phone to my lawyers instructing them to draw up a writ, which I served on the paper as soon as I landed in the UK. The upshot was the paper had to print, of course at a later stage, a retraction and pay substantial damages. I did waive my rights to compensation and an apology if the paper sacked John Cross, the journalist who wrote the poisonous article. They declined my generous offer.

The next morning I borrowed Mohamed Al Fayed’s helicopter, which was emblazoned with the Harrods livery, and flew with an ensemble of mates to Cardiff. We landed in the hotel grounds in the full glare of the world’s media but I still had no interest in talking to them whatsoever.

From the hotel we travelled to the game, a fifteen-minute journey by minivan. The driver couldn’t get us close to the stadium as we had left it late so he dropped us as near as he could. But he had dropped us off at the wrong side of the stadium.

This was the side where the West Ham supporters were situated and we were required to walk right through them to get to our entrance.

It didn’t really bother me and off I set with my gang behind me. I got about hundred yards before I was hauled back by my friends, who decided this was a very bad idea. Indeed, as the volume of abuse began to rise once I was spotted, Theo Paphitis pulled me back and said, ‘Be sensible, let’s walk round.’

Reluctantly I agreed. I assumed his motivations were solely for my well-being but later he told me he was actually in fear of his life. There was only one person West Ham fans hated more than me on that day and that was the chairman of Millwall Football Club.

It was a beautiful day, momentarily ruined when I came into corporate hospitality and there, resplendent in a Crystal Palace tie, was former chairman Ron Noades. I believe he came to this game so that if Palace lost, he could wallow in my demise.

It was a sweltering day and I was wearing a suit that by now could probably have walked itself out to the directors’ box. As it had become my lucky suit and I had worn it to every game since the end of January I dared not go to the match without it.

I had developed superstitions and couldn’t help it. Before every game John my driver had to play Elton John’s ‘Are you ready for love’ as that bloody song had been played on this winning streak.

The game ebbed and flowed. There were nigh on 80,000 fans and the magnitude of the occasion and what it meant to every single person there couldn’t be overestimated.

I remained outwardly unfazed in my held-together-by-dry-cleaning Ozwald Boateng suit and my ever-present sunglasses.

Both sides had good chances to open the scoring but at half-time in the world’s richest game the score was 0–0 with all to play for.

The second half flew by, until the sixty-second minute when we scored and went 1–0 up.

Bedlam broke out in the directors’ box in our section. All my executives and I were up, punching the air.

As the moment calmed I looked across at my counterparts at West Ham in their section and I thought that if I were in their shoes, I would be saying to myself, ‘Knock yourselves out celebrating, you fuckers, there is still thirty minutes to go.’

So I made sure that I cut the celebration as short as possible. In this as in every game, I kicked every ball, disputed every refereeing decision that didn’t go our way, and did it at full volume.

Time exploded and space contracted. The clock crawled as we entered the last ten minutes of the game.

Paphitis leaned across and told me with ten minutes to go that it was worth £5 million a minute. After what seemed an hour there were five minutes to go and he leaned across and said, ‘That’s worth £10 million a minute.’

And every long minute that ticked past he did the arithmetic.

I looked at my dear friend with two minutes to go and said: ‘Yes, mate, I fucking well know it’s worth £25 million a minute.’

Then injury time finally came and went, the referee signalled the end of the game, and Crystal Palace owned by Simon Jordan – yes, the club I owned – had won and were now headed for the Premier League, the biggest, richest league in the world of football, taking our place amongst the elite where in my mind we already belonged.

I was remarkably calm, feeling the four years of battles with everyone and everything had taken their toll. Not talking to the media for six months, my strained relationship with Dowie, the insults from the two buffoons and the newspaper article on the Friday before the game had added to my mood of disenfranchisement. I never enjoyed that moment the way I should have.

As I sat there, Theo told me to get down onto the pitch and celebrate and applaud the fans. I didn’t want to but he made me see sense. So I went downstairs to the dressing room area to go out through the tunnel and onto the pitch.

As I went to walk out, Nick Craig, the in-house legal eagle for the Football League, stopped me.

‘Sorry, Simon, you can’t go out there until the trophy has been presented.’

‘For crying out loud, Nick, this is the moment I have waited for.’

‘Sorry, Simon, it’s Football League rules.’

I turned to flounce off, but then a thought dawned on me and I turned back to Nick Craig and said, ‘Football League rules, OK then, that’s fine. But I am not in the Football League any more. I am in the Premier League so get out of the way.’

I walked past him out onto the pitch to 35,000 screaming Palace fans.

There are moments in life you are lucky to be part of. Yes, this was the achievement of Iain Dowie and his coaching staff and the players, but it was because of me they were here to achieve it.

Standing in the centre circle, my phone going into meltdown, I spoke to Ian Wright, who was screaming down the phone, ‘You did it, Sim!’

I walked around the stadium waving, taking in the euphoria and elation of the crowd, an amazing outpouring of optimism and good feeling.

So this was what owning a football club was all about!

I walked down the tunnel with Dominic after being on the pitch for about twenty-five minutes.

I remember a Sky camera following me and I just looked at it and gave it a shit-eating grin. That grin was for all the people who had been against me.

Sky wanted to do an interview but I ignored them, preferring to kick a ball in the warm-up area with my brother.

We sat around for an hour or so in the hospitality lounge and Nick Craig came in to remark, ‘Here is one Football League rule you won’t mind.’

As we were now a Premier League club, I had to resign from the Football League.

After an hour or so I walked out of the Millennium Stadium with my mates and looked at the empty street. No one had the number of the driver to pick us up so we decided to walk across the road to a local pub. It was heaving inside with Palace fans, and as I walked in the roof came off.

It was the best fifteen minutes I could have spent with the people who make a football club, the fans. Once the driver arrived we made our way back to the Vale of Glamorgan for a big knees-up.

As the celebrations broke out, Debbie, Iain Dowie’s wife, had only this to say to me: ‘That’s going to cost you.’

Charming and unnecessary. She was, of course, referring to the new contract her husband would invariably be demanding and I suspect was a throwback to the non-negotiable contract I gave Dowie six months previously.

When the party was in full swing Phil Alexander suggested I say a few words and as I went to take the microphone Dowie grabbed it and gave a speech. I didn’t think it was his place to do it, but I let him, only to be further disappointed when he made references to myself as ‘not being so bad all in all’ and generally was a little unnecessarily sarcastic about our relationship.

The next day we flew back in the helicopter. As we passed over London and Stamford Bridge Theo Paphitis pointed it out and I gave it a cursory glance, remarking, ‘Yeah, I will see it next season,’ which was greeted with a flurry of abuse from Paphitis. Also at that time Theo announced that he believed that Palace would be in the Premier League for three seasons: autumn, winter and spring – very funny!

I read the papers, which were adorned by Palace’s achievement on the back pages and numerous pictures of me. The Times even had a headline: ‘Golden Boy Does It Again’. It wasn’t the way I would ever describe myself.

Arriving back in town I felt very melancholic. Paul Smith, a friend of mine, was a journalist and the chief football writer for the Sunday Mirror. He had come to know me well over the years and he wanted to do a big article on me. He knew I was disillusioned with football and although I was pleased with the achievement I was not ecstatic.

I did the interview and then left all my friends on the Sunday afternoon at the Grosvenor House Hotel celebrating and getting extremely drunk.

The piece was published saying that, having achieved my dream of getting Palace to the Premier League, I had spent much more than I had anticipated, had had more confrontations than I expected, and hadn’t overly enjoyed the ride. There was a feeling of everything going on around me when really it was going on because of me. And that sense was only going to escalate as the big league beckoned. Maybe it was time for me to sell up.

Shortly afterwards Iain Dowie phoned and there ensued a conversation that was probably one of the strangest between an owner and a manager who had just worked the oracle, won the richest game in football and got promoted to the Premier League. Probably, with hindsight, I should have kept my views to myself.

He was off on holiday to Dubai and had unilaterally decided that there would be no open-top bus to mark our achievement. But wasn’t that my call?

Prior to speaking to Dowie, I had thought about the last six months and what he had achieved, and it had been a phenomenal achievement. But it had taken place against a backdrop of constant belligerence and arguments between us. He was difficult enough to deal with in the First Division, God knows what he was going to be like in the rarefied world of the Premier League. His wife’s rude and unnecessary comment about his contract no doubt reflected his attitude, and his somewhat snide speech at the post-match celebrations reverberated around my mind. I briefly contemplated firing Dowie. It would have been an unprecedented move to remove the manager of a team promoted to the Premier League before even playing a game; it was a step too far, even for me.

Add in the troubles I had with the media, the two buffoons at the sporting dinner, the disruptive newspaper article on the eve of the play-off final – all this made me feel unhappy at a time when I should have been full of pride and happiness. I couldn’t help but think that it was such a shame. And with this mind-set I answered the phone to Dowie.

I told him what was on my mind, omitting the firing bit, and said that I didn’t enjoy working with him.

This stopped him in his tracks for a moment. To be fair on him he said, ‘Simon, that can’t be right. We have to fix that. We are going into the Premier League, and this is your club and we need to be together.’

This brief moment of harmony was replaced very quickly with a list of players he wanted, players out of contract, and, of course, his new contract.

Dowie and I reached an accord, a sort of agreement to get along with each other, and this was supported by me bringing his brother Bob into the fold.

Bob had been doing a lot of work with Iain over the last six months, scouting and match reporting, and I got on quite well with him, so I brought him in as an intermediary to work between myself and Iain as a director of football.

To this day I remain undecided whether that was a good move or one of my stupidest ever.

The dust had hardly settled before I was inundated with every conceivable demand from players, managers and coaches, and that was before you even got into the realms of buying new players.

The benefits of getting into the Premier League were for everyone else but the owner.

Managers, coaches and players all had sizeable bonuses for the promotion. I think we paid circa £3 million in such bonuses. We paid millions out to other clubs who had promotion clauses on players we had bought from them.

Then, of course, the existing playing squad had salary increases for the Premier League and there were players on the last year of their contracts that we had to renew at the manager’s request, which again was not insignificant.

Then we had the contracts of the management. This was Dowie’s moment. He had taken the salary I had told him he would get when he had been offered the job six months earlier; now the boot was on the other foot. He got a 500 per cent pay rise on top of a half million bonus for achieving promotion.

In what seemed like hours since the final whistle, the best part of £7 million had been added to the cost base and that was even before you started to buy for the Premier League.

* * *

I had placed a bet with the bookies at the beginning of the season on Palace to get promoted, which I was not really allowed to do. So I had got John my driver to place it. I had bet £2,000 on promotion and got a betting slip showing odds of 33–1. I had won £66,000 from the bookies, or so I thought.

When John went to collect my winnings the bookmakers said this was never odds they would have given.

‘Pardon?’ was my response, so I sent John back with a flea in his ear to get the bloody winnings.

I was in a bit of an awkward position as I couldn’t go myself and put them in the picture surrounding their ‘not a legitimate’ bet bullshit.

In the end they paid out but only on the basis that it was 33–1 each way rather than straight on, and given there were four teams in the play-offs they paid out at 8–1.

Not a lot I could do really as I was not supposed to bet on my own team so those bastard bookmakers legged me right over.

This was symptomatic of my bittersweet experiences in football. Sometimes even when you won you lost.