Alan Pardew says Crystal Palace investors 'don't know a lot about football' as he thanks Steve Parish for support

Ease the pressure: Pardew steered Palace to a first victory since September
Getty Images
Tom Dutton5 December 2016

Crystal Palace manager Alan Pardew said Steve Parish had to fight his corner amid growing unrest from some of the club's investors.

Palace had lost six Premier League games on the spin going into Saturday's match with Southampton and the nature of last weekend's 5-4 defeat at Swansea intensified the pressure on Pardew.

Parish last week held talks with Pardew as the chairman, along with American co-owners David Blitzer and Josh Harris, grew increasingly concerned with the club's plight.

But the Palace boss steered the Eagles to a first victory since September against Southampton on Saturday to alleviate the pressure as his side also kept a first clean sheet of the Premier League campaign.

Pardew gestured towards Parish in the directors' box after Christian Benteke scored his second and Palace's third in the 3-0 victory over Claude Puel's side.

And asked about the exchange, Pardew said: “The chairman got a little bit edgy this week as you would expect. But he’s been brilliant for me and I just wanted to say thank you to him so I gave him the thumbs-up at the end.

“We have a lot of serious investors at the club who perhaps don’t know a lot about football, so the Chairman has been defending me this week.

“It’s hard to dress up six defeats when you are the owner of a club where you have investors.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in