Brighton and Crystal Palace get set for latest bout in the oddest of rivalries
To many the rivalry is a peculiarity. There is no real geographical proximity to explain the loathing that exists between Crystal Palace and Brighton amp; Hove Albion. Even Roy Hodgson, born and bred in Croydon but whose time as a youth-team player at the south London club predates the animosity, needed a history lesson from Jason Puncheon before he truly understood. The same could be said of some of his players.
Ruben Loftus-Cheek, who hails from up the road in Lewisham, was blissfully unaware of the significance of the fixture until he attended a fans’ event at Boxpark last week and his team-mate Wilfried Zaha took the microphone to address the 1,500 crammed inside the hall. “Wilf was being interviewed and the guy asked him how much he hated Brighton on a scale of one to 10,” said the Chelsea loanee. “Wilf just went: ‘11’, so that tells me everything. I didn’t have a clue before but, when Wilf said that, I realised, OK, they don’t like each other.”
The din inside the Amex on Tuesday night should convince any doubters of the depth of feeling surrounding this fixture. Strangely, given this will be only the 11th meeting in 28 years and the first in the top flight since 1981, the animosity is born of familiarity and stems from the clubs rising in tandem from third tier to elite in the late 1970s under the stewardships of Alan Mullery and Terry Venables, team-mates but never friends during their playing days at Tottenham Hotspur. It festered through tussles near the top of the lower divisions, meetings played out to a backdrop of smoke bombs and trouble on the terraces, and a series of FA Cup first-round replays, two of which were aborted because of bad weather, in 1976.
The fifth attempt to resolve the fixture, on a neutral venue at Stamford Bridge, was won 1-0 by Palace, though Brighton ended up livid with the performance of the referee, Ron Challis (dubbed “Challis of the Palace” thereafter). The official disallowed Peter Ward’s equaliser for a handball – his marker, Jim Cannon, later admitted to having pushed the striker to force the contact – and then made Brian Horton retake a 78th-minute penalty after spying encroachment, mostly by Palace players. Paul Hammond duly saved Horton’s second attempt. Mullery confronted the referee at the final whistle and had coffee thrown over him by a Palace fan as he departed up the tunnel. “So I pulled a handful of change out of my pocket, threw it on the floor and shouted: ‘That’s all you’re worth, Crystal Palace!’” he said. There was also a two-fingered gesture as he was led away by police, and a subsequent £100 fine for bringing the game into disrepute.
Relations have never improved, with collisions forever spiky on and off the pitch. There was a horrific tackle from Palace’s Henry Hughton, brother of the current Brighton manager Chris, which broke Gerry Ryan’s left leg in three places and ended the winger’s career in 1985. Ryan, 29 and a father of two at the time, was in plaster for 15 months. Fast-forward to a second-tier game in 1989 when five penalties were awarded by Kelvin Morton – Palace comically missed three of their four, with John Pemberton’s effort presumably still in orbit – or the mucky intrigue of “poogate” in the play-offs.
Brighton, whose nickname “Seagulls” was apparently taken on to drown out the visitors’ recently adopted “Eagles”, have revelled in a 10-game unbeaten run against their bitter rivals that extended eight years into the mid-1980s, including a 3-0 win at Selhurst Park in April 1981 en route to finishing two points above the relegation zone. Palace went down with 19 points. The London club would rather not recall Mullery’s two-year tenure as their manager under the chairmanship of Ron Noades but can point to claiming the Second Division title at Albion’s expense in 1979, to Andy Johnson’s hattrick in a 5-0 victory in 2002 or to becoming the first visiting team to win a league game at the Amex Stadium in the autumn of 2011.
Glenn Murray, a veteran of more than 100 games in his first spell with Albion and now leading their line for a second time, scored for Palace that evening. He registered 31 goals in the following Championship campaign but rupture a cruciate ligament in the first leg of the play-off semi-finals between the clubs at Selhurst Park and was heckled by visiting fans as he departed on a stretcher. He celebrated the victory on the south coast a few days later on crutches. Despite playing such a key part in Albion’s promotion last season, some have never forgiven that defection. “It’s difficult to change people’s perception,” said the striker. “I would like to think the goals would do it but there are still people out there who doubt me and just don’t like me for that one
reason – that I joined a rival club.”
The Palace chairman, Steve Parish, has since publicly regretted the forward’s sale to Bournemouth in 2015 – he would rejoin Brighton, initially on loan, a year later – and the visitors will be wary of the threat he poses on this reunion. “I had four fantastic years at Palace and was supported really well by the fans so I wouldn’t celebrate, no,” said Murray when asked how he would react to scoring.
Palace have their own talisman to whom they can cling on a first visit to the Amex in four years, six months and 15 days. It had been Zaha whose brace dispatched Albion in the play-offs, the visitors having arrived in their dressing room that night to discover human excrement all over the floor in one of the cubicles. The Brighton manager at the time, Gus Poyet, emailed staff trying to discover who had wound up the opposition in such a way but has since suggested it must have been “a lucky poo – it was in their dressing room and they won”. The suspicion is a member of Palace’s entourage had been guilty of the offence but had kept shtum out of embarrassment while Ian Holloway, disgusted by the welcome, was going ballistic.
Zaha, developed in Palace’s academy, had his own motivation that night. “The stakes were high and I was nervous because we had played them away before the play-offs and they beat us 3-0, and we did nothing – it was literally like a trainingground game,” he said. “It was a bit nerve-racking not having Muzza going into the second leg but someone had to step up. Scoring those two goals was crazy because I was getting so much stick, even in the warm-up. There was one guy that will always stick in my head – just as I went into the changing room before the game he shouted ‘It’s over’ and I heard him above everyone, so it was nice beating them that day after all the chat.”
Few at Selhurst Park failed to note the regular chants of “We’re coming for you” emanating from near the top of the Championship last season as Hughton’s supremely drilled side returned to the elite for the first time in 34 years. “There’s all the chat, them saying they’re coming for us,” Zaha offered up in preseason. “But we’ve been waiting in the Premier League for you, for ages. Now you’re finally here, you want to talk ...” This fixture will mean as much to the Ivory Coast international as it does to Brighton’s fine centre-half Lewis Dunk, who progressed through Albion’s youth setup and will be a direct opponent on Tuesday. Each will seek to carry his side’s hopes.
Yet, to date, Brighton have had good reason to crow. Hughton’s side have been hugely impressive at the higher level, a well-drilled unit in the top half of the table who have conceded only 14 goals in 13 matches, have lost only once at home and whose defeat at Old Trafford on Saturday was a first in six matches. Palace, in contrast, have fired Frank de Boer after four matches, endured the worst start to a season in topflight history and have not scored a league goal away from home since April, let alone claimed a point. At least Hodgson is instigating a recovery, with hope fuelled by Saturday’s last-minute success over Stoke.
The manager inevitably has plenty of experience of derbies, from San Siro to the Black Country. He never lost to Milan while in charge of Internazionale, despite missing the teams’ first meeting because of the only touchline suspension he has served. “I’d made a cynical remark in the previous match,” said Hodgson. “We were winning at Lazio and the referee added on eight minutes of time, so I said to the fourth official: ‘Why don’t you just play on until they score?’” His first game at West Bromwich Albion was a 1-1 draw with Wolves, and his last taste of a derby on English soil was a 5-1 win at Molineux. This rivalry is less established but all parties will find it just as ferocious.