You know that feeling of being ready? Where everything is in its correct place, your socks are pulled up, your laces tied perfectly, you’re physically and mentally prepared and it’s go time?
I’d love to feel like that today.
I don’t, but I’d really love to.
I do think Oliver Glasner feels like it though, as my team Crystal Palace prepare to face Manchester City in the FA Cup final.
He even said he does, though what a manager says in a press conference is, more often than not, fairly far removed from the internal monologue whirring around his brain as a journalist asks the question that everybody knows can’t be answered honestly.
But I believe that he feels it. For the rest of us, it’s calm on the surface but a frenzied rollercoaster of “what ifs” in our mind, like the duck serenely coasting on the pond while its legs whir with furious intent underneath. Glasner is so just unflappably calm, he’s all upper duck. He’s 100 per cent ducking it up and he’s not worried about… anything that rhymes with that.
In a way, he has no excuse for not being ready. With Crystal Palace’s league campaign essentially rendered irrelevant months ago, Glasner has had plenty of time to prepare for this FA Cup final, this little 90-minute kickaround that may prove to be the most important game in Palace history. Not only has he had time to formulate his plan, he even told Pep Guardiola after their game last month, where City stormed back in a 5-2 victory at the Etihad, that he had worked out how to counter Pep’s shape. We’ll see if he’s right, but if he thinks that and says it out loud then I’m willing to believe it. In fact, I think we covered that already. Sorry, I’m nervous.
The team itself has felt ready for a while too.
After a rough start to the season where Palace won just once in 13 games, for the second year in a row the team that Glasner has put out in the spring is somehow completely unrecognisable from the one that began the campaign.
Last year, the strange Jekyll and Hyde nature of it all at least made a little bit of sense.
After all, Roy Hodgson had started the season in charge before giving way to the unassuming Austrian after falling ill. This time around though, it was Glasner’s team all the way through, and confidence was sky-high all summer after Palace screamed into the off-season at top speed, winning six of their last seven games including a 4-0 over Manchester United (that looks a little less impressive given this season’s exploits) as well as a 1-0 win at Anfield and a 5-0 mauling of Aston Villa (for which the opposite is true).
This spring, Glasner’s team have found their feet again, bringing a feeling that I have never known as a Palace fan during the Premier League era: I wake up on the morning of every game and think we’ll probably win.
Much of the change is that the system that Glasner has coached into this team, transforming the players who laboured under Hodgson, is so, so good. It’s solid at the back, with five notional defenders and then two midfielders in front, crowding out the most dangerous parts of the field and compressing into a sort of nine-man block when Eberechi Eze and Ismaila Sarr drop in to help.
But that solidity is not so much of a block as a coiled spring, ready to pop. Palace have become utterly mesmeric in the transitions, Eze sauntering up the field, Sarr slicing and dicing and Jean-Philippe Mateta simply rampaging. It doesn’t always work, of course, but then even when they lose the ball there is the coordinated press to win it back high up the field, the forwards working in symphony as if directed by a PlayStation controller. This is a team that can beat you by hitting it long or by playing it around you, with Adam Wharton having never seen a needle he didn’t think he could thread, and Eze’s gliding runs, like a slalom skier drifting between poles, only in this instance it’s Jakub Kiwior or Jan Bednarek rather than downhill gates.
The player who really knits it all together, though, isn’t one of the many being pursued by Europe’s biggest clubs. Everyone knows Eze, the world appreciates Wharton, and Marc Guehi has a move virtually guaranteed, but the player who connects this whole thing is Daniel Munoz.
A Colombian wing-back brought in from Genk last January, Munoz represents everything this Palace team is; unfashionable and not always the prettiest but relentless and very effective. When he pops up in advanced areas, which is whenever the ball is in advanced areas, he is always the mismatch or the extra man. If you were to build a system for his skill set, it would be the one employed by Glasner, and that sort of exceptional fit is rare. Just ask Ruben Amorim, who has been shoehorning the world’s most expensive mime artists into an almost identical shape.
Which is all fine for Palace, but the problem with being a really good football team is that you’re outmatched when you come up against a great one. Unfortunately, that’s what Manchester City are.
As brilliantly as Palace have played over the last few months, sweeping teams away with far bigger budgets and much shinier stadiums, they have laid the occasional egg. One of those came against Man City, a 5-2 defeat last month that was followed by a 5-0 hammering at Newcastle. When it goes badly, it apparently goes very badly indeed.
So for all the confidence in recent performances, and the coach, and the players, and whatever karmic destiny there may be concerning Financial Fair Play rules in football, the conveyor belt of neutrals who keep telling me we’re going to win and that they’re all rooting for us don’t really help much because they didn’t watch us get smashed by the very same team a month ago.
I guess the good thing about being a club that has never won a major trophy is that you don’t know what you’re missing. The hope is that the desire from Palace’s players far outstrips that of the City players, who have played at Wembley approximately 48 times since the first grey hair appeared in Pep’s beard. Yes, these are professionals but irrational hope has a value. We likely need to score a set piece if we are to win this, and I’m not sure we can afford to go behind.
But football can be upside-down sometimes. It is conventional among humankind to laugh when you are happy and cry when you are sad. At our last FA Cup final in 2016, I cried when we went 1-0 up with nine minutes to go and I laughed grimly 90 seconds later when United equalised. We lost that one, like we lost the one before.
What if this time football was upside-down in our favour for once?
At Palace, we are what we are. It’s not perfect, but it’s at least authentic. Even if we lose the final, we won’t lose that.
It’s just that the anticipation of these Wembley days contribute to that intense feeling of having your emotions coiled like a spring. In that way, the fans and the team have something in common.
I just hope they feel more ready for this than I do.
