One fan in the away end at White Hart Lane had reason to cheer harder than any other when Martin Kelly scored the winning goal for Crystal Palace in February’s FA Cup fifth round tie against Tottenham Hotspur.
Because, as Jason Puncheon celebrated with the other visiting supporters, he did so not only as someone who has been following the club for most of his life but as a man who knew he would have a chance to take a more active role in prolonging his team’s Cup run. And lo, at Wembley on Sunday he will be an integral part of the Palace attack trying to beat Watford to a place in the final.
“As a kid I sat in the Holmesdale Stand [at Selhurst Park] but that was my first time for an away game,” says Puncheon of his trip to White Hart Lane. “I really enjoyed it. Everyone was friendly, it was a nice environment to be in.”
Puncheon has a singular place at Palace, both midfield star and man in the street. He grew up close to Selhurst Park, where his mother used to work and his grandmother, living on nearby Clifton Road, would take him shopping in the Sainsbury’s store beside the ground. Money has removed many footballers from the world inhabited by supporters, but chatting to fellow Palace fans at White Hart Lane reinforced to Puncheon how entwined he is with his community.
“It’s weird because a lot of the people in those stands is somebody to somebody I know,” he says. “So somebody works with my friend who’s a bus driver or somebody works with my friend who’s a scaffolder or somebody used to go to my school. So there’s always that bridging gap of having a normal conversation with them instead of just being a footballer as such. It’s refreshing.”
Puncheon started going to watch Palace even before he started playing for the club’s youth team as an eight-year-old, a development that enabled him to attend games as a ball boy. He savours the memories. “I used to come a lot,” he recalls. “I used to watch Bruce Dyer, Ray Houghton, Dean Gordon. I saw Leon McKenzie make his debut, Clinton Morrison. I saw Nigel Martyn playing in his early days.”
He was only three, however, when Palace reached the 1990 FA Cup final and lost in a replay to Manchester United. “But I watched it years ago,” he says. “This group has to go one better than that.”
Puncheon’s return from injury increases their chances of doing so. He missed two months between February and early April with a damaged hamstring, which is why he was in the stands at Spurs. His absence was one of the reasons for Palace’s 14-match winless run in the Premier League, which did not end until they beat Norwich 1-0 on 9 April thanks to a goal by Puncheon. The winless streak had irked him acutely.
“I’m not saying anybody else in the team doesn’t feel the pressure because we all do in different ways,” he says. “But this is my area, this is where I come from, I know everybody around here. To walk to the shops every week and see someone you know who asks: ‘When are you going to win?’ You feel that pressure and you only want the club to do well. When you believe in the team so much it does hurt at times.”
It is a feeling that few others get to experience, although Puncheon highlights illustrious exceptions who inspired him in his younger days. “Players like Steven Gerrard or Paul Scholes, who have played for their clubs for years and cherish it and carry it with them all the way.”
Gerrard and Scholes, of course, spent their whole careers at their beloved clubs. Puncheon, on the other hand, left Palace for Chelsea as a 10-year-old and then played for seven teams as a professional before making it back to where he belonged, 17 years later, when the then Palace manager, Ian Holloway, signed him on loan from Southampton.
“I’ve got a lot of gratitude to him for that,” says Puncheon. “He had me at Blackpool and then brought me here. Then Tony Pulis and the chairman pushed the boat out to get me from Southampton [permanently] and I’ve never really looked back since. I’ve really enjoyed it and the football club has only moved forward.”
Puncheon will have 35 family members supporting him at Wembley and tens of thousands of fellow Palace loyalists. And they will all know that if he wins two more FA Cup matches, Puncheon will lift a trophy that Gerrard and Scholes have won but no one in a Palace shirt has ever got their hands on.
