14

LIGHT AT THE END OF MY TUNNEL

NO SOONER HAD the season finished and the drama of the court case with Dowie concluded than I received the biggest and most monumental news of my adult life. Suzanne was pregnant and I was going to be a father. Initially I was shocked. I mean honestly I was only thirty-nine and having my first child at such a young and tender age! The relationship with Suzanne, although relatively new, was very passionate, and now we were bringing a child into the world together. In my mind I had been looking after a group of children for seven years in football so it would be much more rewarding to have one of my own, and one who might actually love me!

During the summer I had hoped against hope that Peter would come back with a fresher perspective and the next season would be one of achievement and getting back to contending for a place in the Premier League, which was the very reason why I brought him here.

Peter wanted to change the personnel around and freshen up the playing squad to stamp his authority on the place. Players who had been here for a while and become stale needed to move on so a number of senior players left Palace in the off season. We also sold Jobi McAnuff, as he had been one of the disgruntled players who had wanted to leave the previous summer. Relegated Watford agreed a £1.75 million fee and McAnuff left.

As we had a reasonably sized squad and made quite significant additions over two years I felt Peter needed to get the best from the squad he had, not least the players he had spent heavily on last year, before we started more spending. In football, managers will tell you that when they spend your money they will spend it with the same care as if it were their own. Then they proceed to spend it however they want and if they get it wrong they come and ask you for more.

Despite that, my ambition to achieve got the better of me and I still allowed Peter to spend the best part of another £1.5 million on players, bringing in Neil Danns, José Fonte and Jeff Hughes. Our parachute money had run out so funding was now entirely dependent on me.

Significantly reduced gates further depleted our finances. In the space of three years 7,000 fewer supporters per game were following Palace. In the previous season alone there was a £1.6 million reduction in the gate receipts and this trend was to continue. Falling attendances reflects a lack of success, yet as I have said clubs that had been relegated and were achieving far less were still pulling in far more supporters than us giving them a significant financial advantage over us. To compete with them and ultimately achieve promotion back to the Premier League the onus fell on me, which I accepted as a consequence of owning a football club.

We had a playing squad that had cost about £12 million to assemble, a wages bill of £9 million on players, before bringing anyone else in, and a turnover of just £12 million, which meant that the costs associated with trying to achieve success were frankly ludicrous in relation to the turnover of the business. But that was football. In fact, in that financial year to the end of 2008, the actual losses were £8.1 million so I already had a bloody huge headache as the beginning of the world’s financial crisis began.

As a nice respite from thinking about the economics and problems of my football club I played in the Soccer Six tournament, which was televised and held at West Ham United’s ground. Given my football prowess (!) I was made captain of a team, which, amongst others, included Nick Moran, Bryan McFadden from Westlife, Steve Norman from Spandau Ballet and actors Tamer Hassan and Danny Dyer.

Steve Norman’s presence caused great amusement to Nick as I had often been likened to the bass guitarist because of my long blond hair, and not in a complimentary way. We were a competitive lot and not bad at all, with the exception of Nick, who was an asset for every other team apart from the one he played for – he’s a talented actor but even he couldn’t pull off impersonating a footballer! We won all our group games.

Danny Dyer and Tamer turned up late, severely hung over, brandishing a bag of five-pound notes they had just received for a public appearance in Plymouth. Frankly I didn’t particularly much like either of them at the time. I had come across Danny Dyer socially in my restaurant and thought he was a poor man’s Ray Winstone. I left Burke and Hare on the bench counting their fivers, even preferring Nick to them, and still won. In the quarter-finals disaster struck as our star player – besides yours truly of course – Bryan McFadden, pulled a hamstring and featured no more. We were playing Babyshambles, who were quite a strong side, and made up of the members of the band including the infamous Pete Doherty, who was quite a good footballer. I was forced to resort to Danny and Tamer, who were bloody useless. Danny in particular would have difficulty trapping a bag of cement although in his mind he was Wayne Rooney – Mickey Rooney would have been more appropriate. We were knocked out and our dream was over. The only satisfaction I got was winding up Doherty, firstly by waving profusely to his then girlfriend Kate Moss, who I knew via my relationship with Meg Mathews, and secondly when, after one particular scything challenge I enacted on him, he got up in my face full of testosterone and I suggested, ‘There was no need to get the needle,’ referring to his much publicised heroin addiction.

Back to the serious football. Palace played Anderlecht in a friendly and drew 1–1, had a quick tour of Sweden and finished off playing Everton, which saw the return of the crowd’s hero Andrew Johnson in a game that was part of the deal when he was sold. Playing Everton enabled me to fulfil a little boy’s dream. He was the son of a friend of mine from Chester, and was a massive Everton fan. We made him their mascot, walking out on to the pitch holding AJ’s hand, as well as giving his parents an executive box for the game and getting the Everton boys to come up to the box afterwards. This is one of the good things about owning a football club: watching a young man’s face light up as he meets his heroes.

As well as the imminent approach to what I saw as a critical season given the cost implications involved, I also had the added distraction of my approaching fortieth birthday and a lavish party I had chosen to mark it.

I had invited 600 people and sent out invitations with ‘Oh Shit, I am Forty’ on the front and on the back the strapline: ‘The only present required is your presence.’ Inside it had a collage of images from a newspaper shot of me taken after Palace had scored the winning goal in the 2004 play-off final, to pictures of the Club Bar and Dining, images from Telstar and Octane magazine, Aston Martins and Ferraris, The Specials and glamorous women, all the supposed components or interests of my life.

The party had a budget of £600,000, and was held at a venue alongside the Thames. I hired a £35 million boat to take my guests to the event, and had organised a fireworks display in the middle of the Thames, taking place against the backdrop of a lit-up Millennium Dome, which resulted in the world trade boat being forced to stop for fifteen minutes waiting for the display to finish.

The venue was the last working lighthouse on the river, which had been used for television shows and celebrity events. The theme was music, as it is one of my great loves. I hired Kid Creole and the Coconuts to sing on the boat taking us to the fireworks display and the venue.

Inside the lighthouse, each room was decorated in the style of a different decade. A sixties lounge full of Mary Quant-dressed waitresses, a seventies kitsch lounge with hanging chairs and an eighties lounge with power drinks and so on. Each lounge served the drinks of the time, and each environment was revealed at the same time as a musical act of the decade played. The Boot Leg Beatles for the sixties, Imagination played for the seventies and Curiosity Killed the Cat for the eighties. We had the largest video bank screens in Europe and a pre-recorded video hosted by Nick Moran talking about each decade with messages from friends. As my pièce de résistance, I had two acts. All summer I negotiated with Bryan Ferry to play and after agreeing to £90,000 for forty-five minutes, he promised to do me a favour, after initially refusing, and sing ‘Avalon’, my favourite Ferry song.

Finally four years after I first mooted the idea and twenty-six years since they last played, my friends The Specials started my much-dreamed-about re-formation in earnest and played for me for free. The guest list included movie and television stars, footballers and models, all the people from my life, from Kevin Spacey to one of my dearest friends, Deano, a builder from Sheffield who I had known for twenty years. My most special guest came to the party and was very quiet, but she was there, my soon-to-be-born beautiful daughter!

I had come a long way: I had built myself up from starting a small business to owning a football club, a restaurant group, a magazine, a film company, a Spanish property company. I had investments all over the world and was able to throw a party like this attended by A-listers from media to movies to money. This party showed where I was in the world. One thing I should have remembered: as quick as things come, they can go!

Telstar, the film, was in production during this time. Set in the 1960s, Telstar is a biopic of the music producer Joe Meek who gave the world the song ‘Telstar’ and a host of other hits. Nick Moran came on as the director, and I hired Guy Ritchie’s producers Adam Bohling and Dave Reid to work alongside me to make the film. The six-week shoot kicked off in July 2007 at Twickenham Studios.

It was the first British movie in forty years to be independently funded and produced. I had decided that I would approach the film world in the same way as I had approached the football world: trying to ‘knock the world out with my chin’. By making the film in the manner that I wanted I did not want to involve ‘sales agents’, nor partner up with an investor or film distributor. I backed myself and my project, and took all the risk, believing I would produce a successful film.

The original budget was around the £800,000 mark but by the time I had looked at it and understood what it took to make it high quality it was up nearer the £2 million mark. Not only did I take on two top producers, I wanted a great cast and we set about hiring one. Con O’Neill, an Olivier- and Tony-winning star, took the role of Joe Meek in the play and was so startlingly good he was a shoo-in for the lead.

We auditioned many people including James Corden, who read for the part of Clem Cattini, the famous drummer. When Corden came in he was great in the read-through, which I sat in on, but I felt he was slightly too heavy and suggested, to the horror of the producers and director, that he train with the fitness instructor at Palace to lose weight. The horrified response was that he was an actor not a footballer! We asked him politely to drop some weight if he wanted the part, and it was an indication of how much Corden wanted the role that he duly did – that is, until the on-set catering kicked in!

As well as Corden we hired Ralf Little, Pam Ferris and JJ Field, who went on to appear as Union Jack in the Captain America film. We took on some well-known British actors: Rita Tushingham, Jess Conrad and John Leyton. The young Leyton actually featured as a character in the film and was played by another actor. We hired Jimmy Carr, Marcus Brigstocke and also took on two big-name musicians – Justin Hawkins from the Darkness and Carl Barat of the Libertines – to play pop stars of the era.

Finally I wanted some gold dust, a marquee ‘signing’. We looked at a host of top-name actors, including Tom Hanks who had seen the play, loved it and actually came backstage to visit the cast. Tom considered it but he had scheduling issues, as did Anthony Hopkins and Bill Nighy. But one of my favourite actors, and someone I had met through Nick Moran, was pursued with vigour. I made it clear in a terse call from Spain to Nick and the producers, that no headline name, no film. Within an hour Nick came back and said he had secured Kevin Spacey. I can only imagine what Nick had to do for that! But Spacey was whom I really wanted and we were now in business.

As well as the on-screen talent, you need talent behind the scenes and we hired some of the best. We had a brilliant production manager in Russell De Rozario, the BA Baracus of production design. He was able to build anything from anything and if we forgot something in a particular scene he would go and ‘procure’ it; his only shortcoming was that he was a Chelsea fan.

The film business has a great number of similarities to football. Your manager in football is your director in films and your players are the actors. Like their footballing counterparts they are well paid, often very young and full of themselves.

And the similarities don’t end there. As with football you have an endless amount of back-room people from cameramen, production designers, make-up artists, line producers, electricians, grips, best boys to runners; a bit like physios, fitness trainers, masseuses, sport scientists and kit managers. And then you had my favourite similarity, the line: ‘We don’t do things that way.’

As I had in football, I had a desire to make something I was involved in the very best it could be but at the same time ‘sweating the asset’. I have told stories of big monies being spent and sometimes wasted but behind every pound I spent was an intensity in other areas to generate the best we could from everything we did. Along with Dominic I drove every aspect of commerciality at Palace: we monitored and analysed every part of the business, from ticket sales to merchandise, from programmes to hot dog sales, and the operation was slick and dynamic.

I wanted to do the same with the film: there was significant investment from me, from the cast assembled on to the excellent personnel hired and even the film we shot on. As always I backed myself on this film, believing in Nick Moran as a first-time director, and in the story as being compelling and powerful. I had the added advantage of knowing some extremely influential and powerful people in the film business including Paul Higginson, MD of 20th Century Fox, a big Liverpool fan who I had got tickets for whenever they played Palace; Stuart Till, soon to be head of Icon, one of the biggest film distributors and a former director at Millwall; and Peter Rice, head of Fox Searchlight in America, an Englishman living in LA who was a big Palace fan. And I believed this would enable me to fast-track this film. All I had to do was ensure we shot and edited it well, and bingo!

I decided that I didn’t need the dreaded agents – this time sales agents in the film world – and I didn’t overly need distributors from the outset. I thought that I would deal with them after the film was shot. I made my life on this film, as I had sometimes in football, very difficult, as there was an established way of doing things. Sometimes you just have to accept it is not always about ‘breaking eggs to make omelettes’, sometimes the established way of doing things is the right way.

We took an ambitious, take-no-prisoners approach to making the film, from the fluidity of having the producer/money on set so decision-making was easy, to guerrilla filming, where we filmed without licences or stayed eight hours when we were licensed to film for two; doing such things as getting people to dress as policemen and illegally stopping traffic on the Holloway Road whilst we filmed a key scene that had overun by many many hours. There is a better way of doing things than just always going ‘balls out’ and I was to find that the film business is even more brutal, unforgiving and disingenuous than football.

Despite that, the bond between cast and crew was great to see. Everyone shared the same desire: to make a great British film. On the first day of shooting I called everyone together, from actors and directors down to runners, gave everybody a glass of champagne and made a speech about ensuring that this project was the best it could be. I made a toast to: ‘The good ship Telstar and all who sail in her.’ My words had the desired effect and the commitment from everybody on this project was 100 per cent.

The 2007–08 campaign was fast approaching and I was a busy boy with plenty of things to occupy my mind like parties, films, court cases and the arrival of my first child. But, as it had for the last seven years, football took centre stage. I had grown over the pre-season a little disinterested in Peter. This sounds like a strange observation to make but I think I knew that it was only a matter of time before I fired him.

At the end of every season senior players would come and have a chat with me. It was not something I encouraged, but I listened to their views and made up my own mind. Dougie Freedman was a player who usually came to see me. We had known one another a long time. I wonder how Dougie would feel now, given he is the manager at Palace, if his players were going off to see the chairman without his knowledge!

This summer Freedman was scathing about what was going on at the training ground and pleaded with me to come and see for myself. He said that there was no discipline, the training was poor, Peter was not involved and the fitness regime was a joke. I took it all on board but I couldn’t go to the training ground as it would be undermining the manager. I would see the endeavours and abilities of the training ground at 3 p.m. on Saturday. But as Freedman left it did strike a chord as the team had been poor the previous year. The players didn’t appear as fit as they had under previous regimes and we also seemed to be getting more than our share of soft muscle injuries. So whilst I appeared to ignore it, Freedman’s complaint stuck firmly in my mind and it was not going to take much for me to take drastic action.

Just before the new season was underway we were faced with a very curious set of circumstances. Gabriel Heinze the Manchester United and Argentinian international defender wanted to leave Old Trafford and was being publicly courted by their arch-rivals Liverpool. Alex Ferguson, supported by his board of directors, said he would never consider selling Heinze to Liverpool. Phil Alexander received an approach from someone called James Green who purported to represent a South American football agency caller Soccer SA.

The gist of the conversation was that this agent wanted Crystal Palace to buy Gabriel Heinze from Manchester United and then immediately sell him on to Liverpool, thus circumventing United’s position, and we would be paid £1 million commission or in my eyes receive a bung for participating in this unsavoury affair. My stance was no way were we getting involved and I told Alexander to contact David Gill, Manchester United’s chief executive, and tell him of these attempted shenanigans, which he duly did. Of course I took the opportunity to get Phil to advise Gill we would like them to remember the favour. The upshot was there was an ongoing Premier League dispute between Heinze and United and we were required to give evidence and this strange and murky set of affairs was resolved by others!

Our opening game of the new season was away to Southampton and brought a convincing 4–1 victory. Miracle of miracles, Jamie Scowcroft scored a hat trick. As I left St Mary’s I got waylaid by a group of disgruntled Southampton fans who wanted to tell me that: ‘Palace were shit and not fit to grace our pitch.’ The fact that we had just trounced their team 4–1 seemed to elude them. The perverseness of emotional fans never ceased to amaze me. Of course, I told them if we were indeed as bad they thought then God only knows what it made their team, or words to that effect. That made for a very brisk stroll to my car.

That was the last time we were to record a win for nearly two months and by September normal service resumed under Taylor’s uninspiring leadership and we were languishing in sixteenth place having already been as low as twenty-first. My relationship with Peter was cordial but I had lost my faith in him and rumours were circulating in the newspapers about Neil Warnock coming in. When I invited Peter to my birthday party along with Steve Bruce, Trevor Francis, Steve Kember, and Neil Warnock, Peter declined to go, and that said everything about where our relationship was.

During that period we had played newly relegated Charlton Athletic for the first time since the fateful day in May 2005. The bad blood had increased with the Dowie court case and an article I wrote in the Observer in August of the same year about the conga-dancing celebrations of their fans at our relegation! I remarked that I felt they behaved like morons. A spokesman for a Charlton’s fans’ group said: ‘They were astounding comments from an ex-Premier League chairman.’ He demanded an apology he never got. He did add the rather perceptive comment: ‘There were 24,000 Charlton supporters at the Valley that day, including myself. That’s an awful lot of morons.’

My response was: ‘In retrospect, of course I regret calling them morons, imbeciles would have been more appropriate.’ This of course fuelled the flames and the bad blood so the atmosphere for this game, which was always explosive, had more of an edge. Their buffoon of a chairman, Richard Murray, was notable by his absence in a game we lost, much to the joy of the Charlton fans.

Unfortunately there was trouble after the game. The spectre of football violence hasn’t disappeared, it just doesn’t get as much coverage as it once did. Many a time I sat in the police control room at Selhurst Park watching the CCTV cameras on the away supporters, horrified by the threat of imminent violence, most notably with Millwall fans.

It appeared that some Charlton fans, including young supporters, were attacked on their train journey home by a mindless element of Palace fans. This was reported by Kelvin MacKenzie in his column for the Sun. I had had no time for MacKenzie’s opinions when he was editor of the paper and I had even less time now he was a columnist. His piece condemned the cowardly Palace fans, which was difficult to disagree with, but then went full tilt into blaming me for the attack, suggesting comments I had made two years ago were the catalyst. I took this very seriously and considered legal action against the Sun.

The only other match we won in the first eleven games of the season was against Sheffield United and given the events that followed there was a significant amount of irony in that win.

Coming into October we played Plymouth away and quite frankly I made more effort getting to the game, by train, plane and automobile than the team put into the match. The performance was horrible, one of the worst I had seen, and I knew then that Taylor was a dead man walking.

The last match Taylor took charge of was against the team I had taken him from sixteen months earlier, Hull City. Frankly I had no interest in the result. In fact, for the first time I wanted us to lose as, come rain or shine, I had no further requirement for Peter Taylor’s services. As it was we played quite well and actually should have won but drew 1–1. I left the ground immediately after the game not wishing to speak to Peter. What I did do was phone the one manager I had coveted for a long time and tell him in no uncertain terms that his services were required!

On Monday 8 October I went down to the training ground to see Peter. He was having his annual meeting with the League Managers Association. He was sitting in with Ray Graydon, the former Walsall manager, when I cut short that interview. I asked Peter for two minutes and told him that with immediate effect I was relieving him of his duties and advised him that Kevin Watts would take it from here. Taylor took it with good grace and even made a joke as he walked back into Graydon about the irony of having his annual managerial chat and getting fired!

I think part of Peter was relieved. For me, there had been a tinge of regret or reflection with virtually every manager I had fired or parted company with. I felt neither with Peter and it was certainly not because I disliked him. I had always felt in my gut that he was a coach, not a manager, and he had proved to me that that was all he was – if that. Frankly I was agitated after wasting sixteen months, significant monies and allowing a general downturn in the morale of the supporters.

Without delay I made the move for the man I had wanted for some time. It was to prove to be my best football decision. I brought in a manager who finally showed me what owning a football club could and should mean. An all for one and one for all mentality. A togetherness and support and a complete respect for others’ acumen. My new manager would not give me two and a half years of total success but the most enjoyable rewarding time. How ironic it was to be my last appointment that brought me that!

I appointed Neil Warnock as my eighth and final full-time Crystal Palace manager on 11 October 2007. Prior to the appointment we had a little haggle over money. Neil wanted more than I wanted to pay. I had to pay off another manager in Peter Taylor and wanted to keep managerial costs in perspective yet at the same time pay Neil what I thought was right. I convinced Neil to come for the right reasons, telling him that he and I could fly together and if we did, money would be the last of our issues. The only concern raised was by his lovely wife Sharon, given we were friends. If it didn’t work out then she didn’t want us to lose our friendship. My only comment to Neil on that was: ‘Are you going to ever lie and cheat me?’

‘No, of course not,’ he replied.

‘Then whatever happens we will always be friends.’

The press conference on 11 October was one of the most relaxed I had done. I was genuinely delighted to have Neil with me. Certain segments of the media couldn’t get their head round it, describing it as a ‘a marriage made in hell’ and ‘the two most combustible men in English football sitting side by side’. What they failed to take into account was that our relationship had been forged over years of friendship. Neil and his family stayed on my yacht in Marbella for holidays and we were very close confidants. All in all we knew one another well and wanted to work together.

I never really went to the training ground after the first season and a half of my ownership, as there was little point. My relationship was with the manager and his with the players. The training ground was the manager’s domain, and my view was that the chairman coming on to it undermined his authority. If I felt the need to check up on my manager on the training ground then I should not have him in the job in the first place! When I did go down, more often than not, it was to fire the manager!

Often it is the case when a new manager comes in that he will automatically make stock comments about the players not being fit enough and this and that being wrong and laying the blame on his predecessor by inference. But in this instance I took it upon myself to look at the training ground after Taylor’s departure and it was a diabolical mess. Players’ standards were low, medical records that were a must hadn’t been maintained, the scouting network and reporting was scandalously bad and the fitness records of the players, key indicators to how successful fitness coaches were, were all over the place. I was horrified at the state of that department. My mind flashed back to the conversation with Dougie Freedman in the summer, but the results on Saturday had indeed told me everything I needed to know.

Unlike previous managers, the first thing Neil did was to find a house and a school for his children and move his whole family down to south London. It showed me everything I needed to know about how committed he was to the job.

I had taken Peter Taylor out during an international break and Neil had ten days to get his bearings before his first game at Blackpool. During that time he proceeded to look at the squad and facilities. Neil brought in his own team, which I sanctioned, despite the costs, in order to support him, Mick Jones as assistant manager, Keith Curle as first-team coach and Nigel Cox as physio.

I felt genuine excitement approaching the first game of Neil’s reign, away to Blackpool. I flew in from Spain and watched us play in freezing cold conditions, initially irked by the fact Blackpool came out onto the pitch to our signature tune, ‘Glad All Over’. I was far from glad all over. We were disappointing and quite poor. I’d hoped for a rousing start because of Neil. We scraped a 1–1 draw. I felt genuinely deflated as for the first time in a while I had felt energised again, but as Neil told me at the time: ‘I am a good football manager not a bloody magician.’ He might have been wrong on one of those scores. The next two games were at home to high-flying Stoke City and table-topping Watford; both games resulted in convincing defeats.

Neil looked at the squad and, believing in using young players, gave a debut against Watford to a fifteen-year-old who had been raved about in our academy. Said to have inspired interest from Barcelona, he was one of my future stars and a player who was to cause me consternation, young John Bostock. He’d been with the club since he was nine and had proclaimed himself a future Palace captain. After this game and the manner in which we were comprehensively outplayed, my mood was one of reflection. Watford were top of the league and the club had high expectations of the season; in the two years since relegation, we were nowhere, struggling, with no expectations. I contemplated sadly how it had come to this and after that game my mood was very low, strangely lower than when we had been relegated from the Premier League and lost in the play-offs so badly in 2006.

Neil decided to change the dynamics of the team after these opening three games. He was unhappy with the ethos and personnel. Paul Dickov, who had joined in the summer with the promise of repaying me for my help when he was arrested in Spain in 2003, was shipped out on loan as his performances on the pitch were poor. There was also an incident in training when he had gone over the top in a tackle and Neil decided he wanted him gone. Neil brought in a host of loan signings and also decided that he was going to use the younger players in our squad who in the previous season had been overlooked, which was music to my ears. Neil was unimpressed with some of the senior players, saying privately to me that the younger players couldn’t do any worse than the so-called senior pros. He decided that our £1.25 million centre half Leon Cort was not for him, saying at the time that he liked his centre halves to have scars and battle wounds, implying that Leon was soft!

He suggested the idea of selling Cort, which I said was his call. I awoke the next day to see he had sold Cort for an agreed £1 million to Stoke City, who ironically Cort had played his last Palace game against. It’s funny how two managers see the same player differently. We had taken Clint Hill, a slightly injury-prone centre half, the other way, who became a warrior for my club, on an initial loan deal to become permanent in January. The fact that Neil had gone and done it with no recourse to me whatsoever made me laugh, as in the past I would never have allowed such a thing, but such was my faith in him and his take-charge approach.

Despite these decisive actions Neil did express some reservations about achieving anything with what he had as a playing squad. I gave him the answer I gave him many times over the next two years: ‘Good job I have you!’

My enormous faith was not misplaced as I was about to discover, but even I was staggered by the transformation of this team. From my depths of depression after the Watford game, what started as a mentality that we must stop conceding goals turned into a fifteen-match unbeaten run spanning three months. After our turgid but dogged 0–0 draw on 3 November away to Scunthorpe, which left us second to bottom of the table, not even I could see this coming. It took us from twenty-second in the table to fifth, winning nine games and drawing six and taking thirty-three points. That form would have won any league in the world.

He got players who had previously been poor to really step up and play at a level I had never seen from them before. He took our young players, two of whom were Victor Moses and Sean Scannell, and put them in the first team. We also brought in a raft of loan signings and two players really pushed us into gear. Scott Sinclair, a tremendous talent, was brought in from Chelsea and, as Neil wanted a midfield player, I suggested we look at re-signing Shaun Derry from Leeds, and he was a revelation. These factors, combined with the particular rise of young Victor Moses, were pivotal to our success.

In amongst this was a most satisfying win for Neil away to Sheffield United on 29 December. It was his first return to the club since his departure in the summer. In my view he had been shoddily treated by the club’s owners.

In fact, every time we went to Sheffield United, the lack of empathy towards Neil as their manager from the United fans always surprised me given he was a Blades fan through and through and one of the most committed individuals you could have. But in his new incarnation as Palace manager he was given an ovation from the Sheffield United fans on his return to Bramall Lane, and I remarked to his wife Sharon, ‘Shame they didn’t give him that support when he was here.’ And she nodded knowingly. I know this win pleased Neil as he had a point to prove, but at the same time he was sad, as under Bryan Robson, the then United manager, his beloved team were in decline.

During November I had some other pressing matters. The filming on set of Telstar had virtually been completed and we had one piece left to do in Spain as the central character took a holiday there in the script. So I flew the lead actor Con O’Neill, another actor, Sid Mitchell, and the director Nick Moran to my house in Spain hoping to catch some sun in which to film. The weather was unpredictable but at 8 a.m. the day after they arrived in Marbella I looked out my window and into the November sky and saw sun. In a frantic rush I got the actors out of bed, and myself and Nick spray-tanned them, and dashed them off down to the nearest beach to film a scene in their swimming trunks. It was sunny, but it was still pretty cold. We had no licences or permissions yet managed to film for the duration of the day.

As we sat over dinner contemplating the ridiculousness of the above scenario, I got a phone call from my now heavily pregnant partner Suzanne, who said her heart was racing at a phenomenal rate. When I asked her what it was she told me it was beating at 170 according to her count. ‘Christ, you are seven months pregnant, call the ambulance, darling,’ was my frantic response.

Fifteen apprehension-filled minutes later she phoned me back and I spoke to the ambulance medic, who told me that her heart rate was now at a staggering 230 beats per minute and they were immediately taking her to hospital to stop her heart, inject her with adrenalin and restart it!

Can you imagine being told that this is happening and your partner and unborn child are at risk? I was in a state of complete panic. After I had hung on by the phone for nearly an hour in abject terror, Suzanne’s chirpy little voice came on the phone: ‘Everything is all right; I’m fine.’ That certainly put life into perspective; it also put Suzanne in the Portland Hospital – with no expense spared – for eight weeks after she had a recurrence not long afterwards! It seemed that the reason for the attacks was that Suzanne had been taking the wrong dosage of her medication for ME.

After the scare in November and Suzanne being ‘locked up’ in a luxurious room at the Portland Hospital, on 18 January 2008 at 9.02 a.m., and weighing seven pounds and two ounces, my beautiful little girl Cameron was born. And in a distinctly un-Jordan-like way she didn’t utter a murmur for days. Cameron arrived in the world via a Caesarean and the previous evening Suzanne and I had discussed the birthing music. I had wanted ‘The First Cut is the Deepest’ and Suz suggested ‘Strangers in the Night’. We ended up settling for ‘Glad All Over’, the Palace theme tune. Of course we didn’t, even I couldn’t get away with that. I am pleased to say I have an adorable but wilful little girl who is the light of my life, especially in recent times.

Just a week after my beautiful little girl was born, my father had to have a second huge operation on his heart. He had had a quadruple bypass in 2005, which astounded us all at the time as he was such a fit man. He came through that operation with flying colours but this time round the operation was fraught with complications. The first operation had lasted almost five hours, but this was getting on for ten and as time dragged by Dominic and I became more concerned.

We had been waiting for news but after hearing nothing we went to the hospital, and were told there were serious complications. There was internal bleeding and they couldn’t sew up his chest and had to leave him in the theatre overnight, on a table with his chest packed with ice and gauze. The next day they managed to stop the bleeding and sew him up, but he was now on a ventilator and in a very serious condition and was not getting better. This was the first time I saw my father in such a vulnerable state and there was a very real possibility he might not survive: his blood pressure was almost non-existent, his oxygen content was incredibly low and his lungs were collapsing. Over the next three days this situation got worse rather than better.

Dominic and I sat by his bed day in day out; my father was kept breathing by the ventilator and so heavily medicated that he was only partially aware of us. I spoke to him about Palace, about anything to try and engage him. It was heart-wrenching for us, but nothing compared to what he was going through.

After about five days of doctors shrugging when we asked what they were going to do next for my dad, I exploded in the intensive care unit to such an extent they threatened to throw me out. I wanted something done and I didn’t care how they did it. The specialist said there was an American who was an expert in these circumstances they could get in. ‘Get him in, then!’ I exclaimed. It took a day or so for him to arrive and after what appeared to be the turning of a few valves and the pushing of some buttons, within hours my dad was sitting up, coherent, still on the ventilator but talking and on the road to recovery. But what if I hadn’t had that emotional outburst?

Back to the comparatively trivial business of football.

We reached the end of January still unbeaten but then surrendered inexplicably away to Leicester and then lost two more games on the bounce, one of them away to Charlton. It was the first time I had been to the Valley since May 2005 and relegation from the Premier League. The game was moved to a Friday night due to police intelligence of potential crowd trouble and I was instructed that I was going to have a police escort into the ground, which I duly ignored, and stewards sitting next to me, such was the bad feeling between the clubs, and more so from the Charlton fans towards me.

I went with my entourage of six friends who now accompanied me to most matches. They were always frustrated by my desire to be at the game only five minutes before kick-off so as not to fraternise with the opposition, whilst they wanted to sit in boardrooms quaffing wine and eating laid-on meals. The atmosphere as I walked in was intense and very quickly I was surrounded by stewards and police. I got to enjoy the spectacle of the Charlton fans singing the words of the song I now knew well: ‘Simon Jordan is a wanker, is a wanker.’ Worse than that I watched us get beat 2–0 with some rascal little kid sat in front of me in his Charlton scarf, turning around taking pictures of me on his camera phone, which amused me no end!

It did however become serious when the police instructed me to stay in the ground for an hour after the match. No way was I sitting around in that stadium and I told them so. I was escorted, along with my friends, by stewards and police who scrummed together and virtually lifted me off my feet and through the crowd as bottles and abuse rained down. Even I had to consider that was a little scary and perhaps I should have taken their advice.

In December 2007 I had travelled to Barnsley to watch us play. We had received a request from the wife of an ardent Palace fan who lived in the area. Her husband Carl had terminal cancer and wanted to see his beloved club and to meet me. I met Carl Lewis before the game and had a long chat, and this man’s indomitable spirit moved me so much that on leaving him I instructed Phil Alexander that whenever Carl was free, I wanted a private jet sent for him and his family to fly them to London, and for them to be put up in a hotel, to meet the players, sit in the dressing room before the game and be my guest at a game of his choice.

But early in the New Year, my PA received an email from his wife Jane. I still have it today, it reads:

Could you please forward this to Simon from me. Simon will never know what it meant for Carl to meet him at Barnsley. Carl was so looking forward to being a guest in the boardroom and meeting Simon again, but unfortunately that will not now be possible. Carl was discharged from hospital three weeks ago because he was given a prognosis of two to three days at most. I didn’t want him to die in hospital so brought him home.

Carl is now very poorly and I don’t expect him to last more than a few days. I would like Simon to know that the first Palace match I went to with Carl, I looked across at this man with longish blond hair, a fur coat and a mobile phone in his hand. I asked Carl who he was to which Carl replied, ‘That’s God!’ Quite indignant that I didn’t know. So Simon, I can’t thank you enough for allowing Carl to meet his God and only wish he could have had his lunch with you that he was so looking forward to.

This email made me cry, as it does even now as I am writing this, and I have never forgotten Carl. For someone to suffer this way and to think of me in the manner he did was humbling and it showed how important football was to people and how privileged I was to be held in such regard.

I emailed the letter to Neil Warnock with the accompanying message. ‘Neil read the below. This is the reason why I stay in football and am determined to succeed because of people like this. Heart-breaking!’ I wanted Neil and the players to know about this man and how much he loved his football club and what they did.

It looked as if the wheels had come off this phenomenal turn-around under Neil as we set off to play Bristol City on a freezing cold Monday night in February with a team decimated by injuries. There was a little niggle between the two clubs as when we had played them a month earlier in January and beaten them 2–0, they had bitterly complained that we were over-physical. This game was not without controversy and was delayed for fifteen minutes due to floodlight failure. As the game was live on Sky the referee came on television and explained the delay and it has to be said he looked very strange, his eyes were as wide as saucers.

The game eventually got under way. We were flat in the first half but came flying out the blocks in the second and scored through our seventeen-year-old left back Lee Hills, making his first start for the club. We were still in the lead at ninety minutes. But then, after a disgraceful decision – and not the first we got at Bristol City – the referee awarded four minutes of injury time and with no events in the those four minutes to prolong that period, proceeded to play another minute in which Bristol City got a corner and scored.

Cue outrage from the manager and the chairman. In the boardroom after the match, the Bristol City chairman, rather than be magnanimous about this highway robbery was doing a celebratory dance. As I glanced over with the red mist descending, he reminded me of some demented Morris dancer. This resulted in a coffee cup being flung at the TV by me. Perhaps I should refrain from going into boardrooms, I thought. Neil went on TV and had a rant about the referee, being funny in an outraged way, saying at one point he thought it was a bit strong that the referee punched the air in celebration when Bristol scored!

Neil was charged by the FA for criticising the referee and I suggested he put down his mitigating circumstances in writing and I would read the letter before it went off. I can write and say some outrageous stuff but Neil accused the referee of everything from being ‘The third gunman on the grassy knoll’ to an outlandish suggestion as to what may have caused his strange appearance on TV before the game. Even I couldn’t let him write that and toned it down, to no avail as he still got fined and I got to pick up the tab.

We lost again on the Saturday at home to Wolves, a team we had annihilated 3–0 away a month earlier and dropped to eleventh, and it looked as if we had fallen away. But not this team or, more to the point, this manager. We put in another Herculean effort to win six and draw four of the next eleven games and went into the last match of the campaign needing to beat Burnley at home to secure a play-off place.

In the just under ten years of my ownership this was my favourite day. Naturally there had been significant highs that preceded it. The play-off final win in 2004, the League Cup semi-final victory over Liverpool and a variety of other big days. But this was the day I will always remember. It was what I always wanted from my ownership of the club, a day when owner, manager, players and supporters were in complete harmony.

We thrashed Burnley 5–0 to take our place in the play-offs with our young star Victor Moses opening the scoring. The stadium was a scene of unbridled joy as Neil took the players for the customary lap of honour in the last home game of the season. He took the microphone on the pitch and applauded the players and the fans for their tremendous efforts and then out of the blue announced that the person who should be thanked the most was the chairman.

It was the most embarrassing and gratifying moment I had in football. Not because I needed the plaudits but because the manager, a person in other guises I had nothing but strife with over the years, had publicly stated such support and gratitude. It meant an awful amount to my family and defied all the people who had said that the relationship between Neil and me was doomed from the outset.

Whether or not we won or lost in the play-offs this achievement was by far and away the best. Unlike in 2003–04 when Dowie inherited a very talented but grossly underperforming team, this squad was made up of a mixture of tremendously talented young players from our academy, some senior players who had not covered themselves in glory prior to Warnock’s arrival and a raft of inspired loan signings. And they all shared an incredible bond and a will to win, which had been instilled in them by Neil Warnock and his management team.

Now we were facing Bristol City in the play-off semi-final, with the added pressure of being favourites to secure promotion back to the promised land and all that meant. Not least of all the release of the tremendous financial pressure on me.