In the light of our chairman praises one of our former managers, I think I’m going to jump on the bandwagon too. This week, Steve Parish heaped the praise on former manager Dougie a Freedman and wished him all the best in his new venture to get Nottingham Forest into the Premier League.
It doesn’t seem long ago that we were playing some of the best football I have ever seen us play away at Leicester and the fans in chorus singing “oh Dougie Freedman what have you done”. Since then we have only grown from strength to strength, with a few minor bumps on route thanks to Holloway and Warnock!
I will openly admit I was hurt by the way Freedman had left the club. I remember him famously quoting “why are you going to believe some rumour that a 14 year old has made up in his bedroom and out up on social media” – two days later Freedman had departed. My gut feeling is that Dougie had every intention of staying but that is for another time. I, like most Palace fans felt betrayed by the departure especially to a side like Bolton who were down at the wrong end of the tale. Money seemed the motive from the outside but from the inside it seemed more like stubbornness from both Parish and Freedman to budge on their offers. The man loves red and blue that is unquestionable from my part – he didn’t leave on best terms but his passion and hard work he gave for this club under his tenure was second to none and arguably rebuilt the foundations of the club after the turmoil of administration and George Burley!
In this day and age managers come and go and as lovely as it was to have a legend in charge of the club who knows where we would be today if he had stayed on. What I will say is that I think Dougie has played a huge part in where we are as a club today. Our biggest strength as a club is our spirit and core spine of the team. Our spine is made up of Murray, Jedinak, Delaney (probably now Dann) and Speroni. Dougie signed 3 of those 5 players and of course introduced us to the likes of Wardy, Bolasie and nurtured Wilf’s progression. His influence on our team today is huge and I don’t think he gets enough credit for the job he did here.
Agreed at times I endured some of the worst football I have ever seen and the truth is if DF wasn’t a Palace legend and we hadn’t been on a cup run he probably would’ve got the boot under the demise in his first full season, but unusually in modern football we stuck by him and that proved a great decision.
My opinion is that without him we wouldn’t be where we are today, we wouldn’t have the humble spirit in the camp he started and we wouldn’t have the players that we do today. More importantly we wouldn’t have had Glenn Murray.
His management ability was highly questioned at Bolton where the players turned on him and he mishandled situations, it was certainly a learning curve for the Scot. He has once again proved his management potential with his emphatic arrival at the City Ground
My legendary status of Dougie Freedman still stands. His relationship with Steve Parish is still good and I think one day you’ll see him back in the helm at Selhurst Park.
