So the day that all Palace fans have been fearing is finally now upon us. Sheffield Wednesday Away. A point needed to survive in this division. A loss... well it doesn't even bear thinking about.
Ever since our form nose-dived following the 10 point deduction imposed for slipping into Administration, people have stared transfixed at the final fixture of the season, just praying it wasn't going to come down to that. But deep down, we all knew it was pre-determined, primed and ready to be written into footballing folklore.
You see following Crystal Palace is the footballing equivalent of living with Bipolar Disorder. Short periods of calm and order, interrupted by wild swings of ecstasy and despair. Pivotal days that will live in our memories forever have shaped our fortunes since I've been a supporter for the past 25 years. That next pivotal moment is Sunday and quite possibly this is the most pivotal of them all.
It's fair to say I haven't been the greatest supporter over the past couple of years. This was my first year without a season ticket, something which felt slightly shameful but also strangely liberating. Watching Palace under Simon Jordan was to me like watching a man on death row. Everything was stacking up against us and the man was slowly strangling the life out of the club, edging us closer and closer to the tipping point of catastrophe, a cliff that we are now well and truly falling off.
A point on Sunday could signal that rock bottom has finally been reached and we can maybe start our climb back up towards the next dizzy high point. Failure to secure this point could, I fear, lead to a period of massive irrecoverable decline, even extinction.
For those of you who support other teams or simply couldn't care less about football, just spare a thought for us Palace fans on Sunday lunchtime. We will be going through it for each and every one of those 90 minutes.
Unless we're 4-0 up at half time. Even we couldn't screw that up? Could we?
Tuesday 27 April 2010
Tuesday 13 April 2010
Free the 'West Memphis Three'
Over the past week or so, I've been startled and engrossed by a series of documentaries about a brutal mass child-murder case which took place in Arkansas, USA, back in 1993. Three 8-year old boys were stripped, mutilated and dumped in a muddy ditch in a small wooded area of West Memphis, known as Robin Hood Hills.
The first documentary follows the police investigation and subsequent murder trials of three young men, Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley. As you can imagine, the utter shock, disgust and outrage that such a heinous crime will bring out in a small tight-knit community is there for all to see and these men provide a focus of hate for a grieving town.
What follows however is nothing short of jaw-dropping as you watch the prosecution press home their charges with the flimsiest of evidence.
I say evidence. There wasn't any.
The sum total of the evidence presented that convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt to effectively end the free lives of these men forever, and put one of them on death row, was as follows. 1) A coerced confession from one of the boys, Jessie, who has severe learning difficulties. 2) The testimony of two young girls who thought they'd overheard Damian admitting to the murders to his friends and 3) The fact that he listened to heavy metal and wore black, so was clearly a satanist.
That was it. Not one scrap of physical evidence. Nothing in the prosecution's case added up. Jesse's account of what happened on the day of the murder didn't even match the known facts of the case. It took the police 12 hours of suggestion to get him to change his story enough so that everything married up. They maintained that the boys carried these murders out in darkness, there in the woods, yet somehow, these young boys had managed to clean up every last drop of blood and forensic evidence from the crime scene.
16 years later they still rot in jail, although DNA breakthroughs since the initial trial have all but proved their innocence (and implicated one of the victim's step fathers)
Even some of the parents of the murdered boys are now convinced of these men's innocence and are actively campaigning for their release.
Yet to do so, would mean the Arkansas law makers admitting they'd made a terrible mistake, which has ruined the lives of three innocent men and allowed a child killer to walk the streets a free man for all this time.
It seems that is too bitter a pill to swallow.
What's more unsettling is to think that this is only in the public arena because HBO decided to document the case at the time. How many other witch hunts and miscarriages of justice have their been in other small towns that we'll never get to find out about?
And if this is happening in The Land Of The Free, the mind boggles as the sheer numbers of innocent people currently locked up or worse around the world as we speak.
Find out more here
The first documentary follows the police investigation and subsequent murder trials of three young men, Damian Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley. As you can imagine, the utter shock, disgust and outrage that such a heinous crime will bring out in a small tight-knit community is there for all to see and these men provide a focus of hate for a grieving town.What follows however is nothing short of jaw-dropping as you watch the prosecution press home their charges with the flimsiest of evidence.
I say evidence. There wasn't any.
The sum total of the evidence presented that convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt to effectively end the free lives of these men forever, and put one of them on death row, was as follows. 1) A coerced confession from one of the boys, Jessie, who has severe learning difficulties. 2) The testimony of two young girls who thought they'd overheard Damian admitting to the murders to his friends and 3) The fact that he listened to heavy metal and wore black, so was clearly a satanist.
That was it. Not one scrap of physical evidence. Nothing in the prosecution's case added up. Jesse's account of what happened on the day of the murder didn't even match the known facts of the case. It took the police 12 hours of suggestion to get him to change his story enough so that everything married up. They maintained that the boys carried these murders out in darkness, there in the woods, yet somehow, these young boys had managed to clean up every last drop of blood and forensic evidence from the crime scene.
16 years later they still rot in jail, although DNA breakthroughs since the initial trial have all but proved their innocence (and implicated one of the victim's step fathers)
Even some of the parents of the murdered boys are now convinced of these men's innocence and are actively campaigning for their release.
Yet to do so, would mean the Arkansas law makers admitting they'd made a terrible mistake, which has ruined the lives of three innocent men and allowed a child killer to walk the streets a free man for all this time.
It seems that is too bitter a pill to swallow.
What's more unsettling is to think that this is only in the public arena because HBO decided to document the case at the time. How many other witch hunts and miscarriages of justice have their been in other small towns that we'll never get to find out about?
And if this is happening in The Land Of The Free, the mind boggles as the sheer numbers of innocent people currently locked up or worse around the world as we speak.
Find out more here
Wednesday 7 April 2010
What choice do we really have?
The hare is now officially running and in a month's time, we the electorate, will be asked to exercise our democratic duty in choosing the next Government for this great country of ours.
But what choice are we really being given? How are we realistically meant to decide on where to put our cross?
Politics in this country is already at its lowest ebb following expenses scandals, illegal wars and voter apathy. A general election should be just what the Dr ordered. A chance to draw a line in the sand and move in a new direction. So why is it so difficult to make any major distinction between the 3 main parties?
Media commentary on the election campaign seems obsessed with the leader's wives, which ad agency have been commissioned for the latest billboards, their oratory ability, which backdrops they chose to make their speeches in front of and the people they chose to have around them as they spoke.
Nothing is said about the content of these speeches or any policy clues they contain. We seem obsessed on the race to No 10, but not what each party will deliver when they get there.
For the first time, I am what you could call a floating voter. Historically always a Tory voter, I'm still waiting to hear anything from Camp Cameron to convince me he deserves my vote. For a while I thought maybe Lib Dem could be the way to go, but again, a glance through their election pledges turns up nothing to indicate any major change in direction.
It seems I'm gonna have to make the concerted effort to trawl the news channels and the depths of the Internet to gleen anything of sufficient gravity to help me cement my decision.
If we're going to turn around the trend of lower and lower turn-outs at the polls, they're going to have to make it a lot easier than this.
For bullshit-free opinion on the election campaign, also see http://matthew-urbanamish.blogspot.com and http://liampennington.blogspot.com
But what choice are we really being given? How are we realistically meant to decide on where to put our cross?
Politics in this country is already at its lowest ebb following expenses scandals, illegal wars and voter apathy. A general election should be just what the Dr ordered. A chance to draw a line in the sand and move in a new direction. So why is it so difficult to make any major distinction between the 3 main parties?
Media commentary on the election campaign seems obsessed with the leader's wives, which ad agency have been commissioned for the latest billboards, their oratory ability, which backdrops they chose to make their speeches in front of and the people they chose to have around them as they spoke.
Nothing is said about the content of these speeches or any policy clues they contain. We seem obsessed on the race to No 10, but not what each party will deliver when they get there.
For the first time, I am what you could call a floating voter. Historically always a Tory voter, I'm still waiting to hear anything from Camp Cameron to convince me he deserves my vote. For a while I thought maybe Lib Dem could be the way to go, but again, a glance through their election pledges turns up nothing to indicate any major change in direction.
It seems I'm gonna have to make the concerted effort to trawl the news channels and the depths of the Internet to gleen anything of sufficient gravity to help me cement my decision.
If we're going to turn around the trend of lower and lower turn-outs at the polls, they're going to have to make it a lot easier than this.
For bullshit-free opinion on the election campaign, also see http://matthew-urbanamish.blogspot.com and http://liampennington.blogspot.com
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