“There will be a little bit of aggression in the crowd,” Alan Pardew, the manager of Charlton Athletic said about the home match against Crystal Palace, managing somehow to keep a straight face as he added: “because of the pre-match traffic.” As a former player for both clubs, Pardew knows better than most that Friday’s south London derby promises to be an intense and heated affair in which passions will inevitably run high - and that is just in the boardroom.
The last time the fixture was played at The Valley, a 2-2 draw in the final Premiership match of the 2004-05 season meant that Palace were relegated after a single season in the top flight, to the delight of many in SE7, and not only the paying customers.
After the game, Richard Murray, Charlton’s PLC chairman, invited Simon Jordan, the Palace chairman, to “enjoy the Championship, tosser,” and challenged him to a fight. Jordan has admitted that there was “personal antagonism” between the two since then, and he took legal action when Iain Dowie, the Palace manager, left Selhurst Park and later joined Charlton. Jordan told the court that he had told Dowie “something along the lines of, ‘You can’t go to a club that was dancing on our effing graves when we got relegated.” Add to that the fact that Charlton were forced to groundshare with Palace for several seasons and there will be a heady cocktail of emotions at the Valley tonight.
”There will be an extra edge to this game, you cant take away from that,” Pardew said. “It’s a Friday night, it’s under lights, you’re playing rivals that you have a history with for whatever reason - the chairmen, Iain Dowie, the trasnsfers between the two clubs, there’s a million things you could talk about,” Pardew said. “So there will be a feisty atmosphere, one of those that you want to play in.”
In another way, Pardew would rather feelings ran less high. “It is sad. The two gentlemen involved could probably do without it. Who needs that? Life’s two short. Nothing would give me more pleasure than if they shook hands before the game and it was water under the bridge. Whether that will happen is debatable. But that’s what I wish. And nothing would give me more pleasure personally both clubs making it back to the Premier League.