Parish’s forays into football create a club with an identity crisis

Chairman undermines managers with dramatic shifts of club strategy and his tactical musings

Beware the chairman who fancies himself as a coach – or a football thinker. Running all the way through Crystal Palace’s managerial turmoil is Steve Parish over-thinking how the team should play. The kind of aesthetic chinstroking Parish has indulged in at boardroom level is not confined to the sacking or Frank de Boer after 77 days.

It is a constant theme running back to Alan Pardew, who was dismissed in December. Then, Parish, the Palace chairman, said: “We all bought into the decision to play a more expansive style of football. That hasn’t worked. It’s no-one’s fault. But now we’re going to wind the dial back the other way.”

Palace’s owners have been winding the dial this way and that, with directors posing as on-field generals. After Pardew, the dial was wound back to Sam Allardyce: an anti-relegation specialist with a more direct style than Pardew’s. The quest for attractive football was set aside, but not for long.

When Allardyce stood down in May, Palace’s owners might have tried to hire Sean Dyche, who has similarities with ‘Big Sam’, but decided a new artistic manifesto was required, reaching into the Dutch tradition – and specifically Ajax – to hire De Boer, whose appointment was described by Parish as “fantastically exciting for this football club, an amazing milestone for us”.

That confidence, that new direction, perished after four games in which De Boer presumably pursued the mandate he thought he had been given: to advance the team beyond survival football, and restore a passing game.

On day one of De Boer’s short reign, Parish reeled off tactical observations. He said: “From the start when I walked into this club we developed a certain style of play; partly because it’s part of the DNA of the club and frankly because it’s less expensive. If you want to play on the break in the Championship it’s less expensive than if you want a lot of technical midfielders. That stuck with us a little bit.”

These rather random declarations might have alarmed De Boer. Another was Parish ruminating: “This year when I watched Swansea and us, I thought the way Swansea played gave them a higher percentage chance of getting a result.”

All chairmen say this kind of thing, after a post-match drink, or to their pals, but few broadcast such views, because they know they risk undermining the manager – and confusing the players. They know where the boundaries are.

De Boer’s team were slow to react to his big tactical changes. Some of them looked unsure they would work.

But if Palace’s owners supported De Boer’s plans to add sophistication to Allardyce’s base, it is lamentable for them to then abandon their own appointment after four games, and “wind the dial back the other way” again, this time to Roy Hodgson, an accomplished manager, but the tactical opposite of De Boer.

From Tony Pulis to Pardew to Allardyce to De Boer to Hodgson is some zig-zag. Even before the Burnley game on Sunday, Parish was saying results had “not been great” and that football was a “results-based business”.

After the defeat at Turf Moor, where Palace played well, the chairman was again in dug-out mode, saying: “Who has the better squad, us or Burnley? We had a much weaker squad when we finished 11th. The buck stops with me. I’ve never run away from that.”

Except that the buck does not stop with Parish. It stopped with De Boer.

Palace fans now wait to hear whether Allardyce and Hodgson are the true “DNA” or if another “expansive” coach will be next. No one knows where the dial will swing next.