Alan Pardew admitted to his Crystal Palace players he had made mistakes and invited their criticisms during a series of “lively” team meetings held during the recent winless slump.
Palace were level with fourth-placed Tottenham Hotspur at Christmas only to endure a 14-match sequence without a league victory, including six successive home defeats which equalled a club record. That run dragged Palace to the fringes of the relegation scrap, though six points from four unbeaten games this month have since eased the pressure going into Wednesday’s game at Manchester United, with a first FA Cup semi-final in 21 years to come against Watford this weekend.
While the players are understood to have held meetings among themselves to consider how best to arrest the decline, Pardew – who has tapped into the experience of the sports psychologist Jeremy Snape – encouraged discussions as a group and stressed the seriousness of the team’s predicament to his players on the eve of this month’s game at West Ham. That match was drawn and results against Norwich, Everton and at Arsenal on Sunday have established a bigger gap to the bottom three.
“We had a couple of meetings before the West Ham draw that were lively and where there was what you would call ‘frank discussion’,” the manager said.
“I had tried a couple of different meetings and different angles, and it didn’t work. The West Ham one was more me putting in front of them the facts. Sometimes you really need to look at the facts in the cold light of day from somebody who is leading the group.
“It’s all well and good the media saying this and that, but that’s an opinion from somebody else. But when that opinion is mine and it’s backed up with facts, then I think it wakes a few up. We woke up at West Ham and since then we’ve looked a different side.”
Players were encouraged to speak their minds, and were free to voice any disapproval with the manager’s own performance. “Well, according to the media, I don’t take any criticism because it’s all about me so, of course, very rarely will I accept criticism,” offered Pardew with no little sarcasm. “You can’t manage at this level if you’re not going to sometimes say to the players: ‘I got it wrong,’” Pardew said. “I have done that many a time in my career, and I have this year.
“Maybe that game-plan was wrong. Maybe, with hindsight, I shouldn’t have gone down that road’... You can’t just criticise the players who couldn’t deliver the game-plan because, sometimes, the game-plan didn’t work. Who’s the finger pointing at then? Players can be reluctant to criticise the manager, so you have to give them an opportunity to do it in a way that isn’t going to make them feel threatened, otherwise they might feel they’re not going to get picked.”
Asked to pinpoint one occasion where he had held his hands up and admitted to a mistake, Pardew added: “In the Liverpool game [lost 2-1 in early March] when they went down to 10 men and I put on three substitutes and we looked worse, then I have to look at myself and ask: ‘Hold on a minute what happened there?’
“Did I give them enough instruction of what they were meant to do when they went on? Was I at fault for that? I have to take some blame for that for sure. I am not going to sit here after the run we’ve had and say that there were no faults on my part. Of course there were.”
