I had to stop being angry and learn to smile again
After THAT headbutt and his Toon ordeal, Pardew on secrets of his Palace miracle
“I react when I feel there has been injustice”
ALAN PARDEW begins this interview with a couple of polite requests. He would prefer not have his picture taken and he has no great desire to discuss how two white budgerigars came to be living in his office at the Crystal Palace training ground.
He eventually explains it has something to do with his daughter and a joke one Christmas about ‘ two turtle doves’. ‘ She tells me they’re my peace birds,’ he says, before admitting he does rather like the background noise they provide when he’s working.
Pardew does appear to be more at peace with himself now that he is the manager at Selhurst Park and no longer embroiled in the madness he occasionally encountered at Newcastle. There were some wild rumours as well as some wild behaviour — most notably when he headbutted David Meyler during that encounter with Hull last year.
After calling Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini an ‘old c***’ and shoving an official Pardew did at least recognise that enough was enough. He turned to Jeremy Snape, the former cricketer turned sports psychologist.
‘After the Meyler incident I realised I needed to change certain things,’ Pardew says. ‘That was the one that pushed me over the edge.
‘For a start I didn’t like being up in the stand (he was banned for seven matches). And while I think there were certain frustrations at that time — we’d lost important players — I knew I couldn’t blame anyone else. I needed to do something about it.
‘So I contacted the League Managers’ Association, and Jeremy’s name came up. And I met him. And we didn’t really talk about the incident. We talked about other things.’
Pardew is tough and uncompromising. Born at home on the Argyle Council Estate in Wandsworth at the start of the Sixties — and weighing in at an eye-watering ‘ 12 or 13 pounds’ — he would arrive late to professional football, working first as a glazier. Was he a bit of a scrapper as a young man? ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘Where I grew up you always had to stand your ground.
‘But no, not a fighter. Jeremy highlighted the fact that I react when I feel there has been some kind of injustice. And he told me that’s when I need to switch off. That’s when I need to focus on what I’m good at. I’ve had a couple of incidents since; what I would say were pre- meditated attempts to provoke a reaction from me. And so far I’ve reacted in the right way and focused on the game. Now I see it as them losing focus.’
Pardew has been so impressed by Snape he now has him working at Palace on a regular basis. ‘ He’s not just here to help me but help the team,’ he says. ‘I like to use him as a kind of overseer — what we’ve done well and what we’ve done wrong. It’s like I’m not just answerable to the chairman but to Jeremy, too. He might say he doesn’t think I gave the right message to the media or something like that. It’s good to have that point of reference.’
Presumably the positives outweigh the negatives right now, given what a brilliant job Pardew has done since he took charge at Palace in January. When he arrived the club was sitting in the bottom three having taken just 17 points from 20 games.
Since then, culminating in Monday’s remarkable defeat of Manchester City, they have taken 22 points from 11 games: a points ratio that would have them in the Champions League places. With the points he acquired before leaving Newcastle he would also be doing well. Team Pardew would be eighth on 48 points.
Pardew has been clever at Palace. He has Wilfried Zaha and Yannick Bolasie working impressively hard on the flanks and the deployment of Jason Puncheon in a more central attacking role has proved extremely effective.
Defensively they have been excellent, too. Pardew thinks Scott Dann should be in contention for an England call-up and has been hugely impressed by the ‘resilience and character of a special group’.
He says: ‘I knew they were underperforming but they’re actually better than I even realised.’
Other Premier League managers will tell you Pardew is also an extremely astute tactician. Is this one of the strengths to which Snape refers?
‘There are a lot of things you have to cover as a manager, things you have to be good at,’ he says.
‘The tactical side of the game, on game day, that is probably my strength. There are other aspects of the job I think I’ve had to learn to be good at. Integrating with players, managing players.
‘I don’t think when I first started at Reading and at West Ham I was particularly good at it. I don’t think I was very good at dealing with the media either.
‘I had to learn to work with people and be less aggressive when I went into a football club. I can be a bit of a perfectionist and I’d go in and want to change everything. Even the colour of the walls. I’ve learned to be more appreciative of the roles different people have at a football club. There are people who were there long before you arrived and will be there long after you’ve gone. I respect that. Here I haven’t even brought in an assistant manager.’
But where does the tactical nous come from? ‘I think the levels (he means his past experience of nonleague as well as professional football) have helped me,’ he says.
‘When you are a non-league team with little or no technical ability and you meet someone decent, you have to come up with a way of winning. A lot of teams set up with a good defensive strategy. But that is fundamentally wrong for me. You must set up with a strategy of trying to win, even against the best teams. ‘I intend to make a tactical change against Sunderland this weekend. We had a great win against Manchester City but Saturday is a different game. ‘People say: “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. But that, to me, leads to mediocrity. That means you never progress. We ain’t broke but I will make changes this weekend, because sometimes, as a manager, you have to be brave. ‘ It can go wrong, of course. I’ve had plenty of those moments when you go into the dressing room after a game and say: “Guys,
that was down to me that one”. I think it’s important to do that, to take the responsibility off the players. Because players, when they lose a game, can suffer.
‘I think it’s important sometimes that you tell them not to be hard on themselves because you’ve actually messed up. I did that a few times at Newcastle.’
At Newcastle he certainly succeeded more than he messed up. In his time there he became the only English manager to be crowned both Premier League Manager of the Season and the LMA Manager of the Year in the same season, having finished fifth in the Premier League in 2012.
And yet he was hounded by the fans, seemingly despised for being too closely associated with the controversial owner, Mike Ashley.
‘I went in there and immediately the stories started,’ he says. ‘There were claims I had these huge casino debts. Nonsense. My friends will tell you I’m a proper tight-a**e when it comes to gambling. On the few occasions I’ve been in a casino I’ll gamble no more than 50 quid.
‘If I’d been someone else I may have got more recognition than I did. But there were other stories of how badly I was treated up there. I wasn’t treated badly at all. On match days there was abuse, for sure.
‘But away from the pitch there wasn’t one incident or anywhere I couldn’t go. Nobody was nasty to me. Nobody threatened me. Load of old tosh.’
He faced other criticism too, though. ‘After a difficult end to last season the local media said I needed to start the season well, and we didn’t,’ he says. ‘That period was probably the proudest I’ve been of myself as a manager, because I didn’t let it get to me. I really dug in and we got the results and turned things around.
‘But you won’t hear me criticise the fans and make generalisations because most of them were terrific to me.
‘I actually look at the North East as an area and I think there are problems that spill out on to the terraces. It’s under-funded compared to the rest of the country. Unemployment is higher in the region than anywhere else. Life is tough and I hope whoever gets into power next month looks at that.’
He had his frustrations with Ashley but says their relationship remained a good one to the very end.
‘It wasn’t always easy with Mike,’ he says. ‘He’s his own man and sometimes I just had to accept his decisions. Occasionally I’d have to defend them, too.
‘But he remained the guy who gave me the job and we could always be honest with each other. And it’s a brilliant job even if it can be difficult.
‘I remember being in the car heading towards the stadium for what turned out to be my last game there and I was still in awe of it. Just looking at that stadium, its position in the city, and thinking “bloody hell, I’m the manager of this place”.’
He says he was pleased to leave on his terms — not sacked but for another job. ‘Absolutely,’ he says.
But he says the move to Palace, to the club he had served with such distinction as a player (this week marked the 25th anniversary of his winning goal in that FA Cup semifinal against Liverpool), was not as straightforward as some might have thought. ‘When I was at Newcastle this job came up two or three times,’ he says. ‘But I feared the job a little bit if I’m honest. I didn’t want to ruin what I had with this club. I didn’t want to spoil that relationship. It could still turn sour.
‘We’re only at the start after all. But I was obviously concerned I might start by failing to avoid relegation. In the end (Palace chairman) Steve Parish — the real driving influence of this football club — sold me his vision, his plans to bring in fresh investment.
‘A bit was made of something I said to the BBC last week about thinking I could do a bigger job.
‘That wasn’t really the point I was making. I was simply saying how limited the opportunities are for British managers, and I was using myself as an example of someone who could have done a decent job at a club competing for the top prizes given the chance.
‘But I’m excited by the challenge at Palace. By the potential we have as the only Premier League club in London south of the river. There’s a huge opportunity here.’
And there’s even a home for his budgies. Their names? ‘I’m not telling you,’ he says. ‘No budgie headlines please.’
“Most fans at Newcastle were terrific to me”