IAIN DOWIE does not believe in luck. The Crystal Palace manager got up at 5.30 on Wednesday morning to watch a Reading match on DVD. The runaway Coca-Cola Championship leaders are visiting Selhurst Park this evening and Dowie does not want to leave anything to chance.
“I am not a great sleeper, I only sleep about five hours a night,” Dowie said. “I’m always up early and a couple of times a week I watch matches before I leave home so that when I get in to work at 7, I have time to fine-tune my work for the training ground.”
Dowie’s attention to detail also means that his team travel to all their away matches by train rather than coach and on Saturday his players had few complaints when they agreed to share their carriage with their supporters on the way back from the 2-1 victory over Hull City.
“It is a very relaxing way to travel,” Dowie said. “The players turn up at the station in the morning and during the journey they get to walk around rather than be stuck on a coach. We’ve been on a few coaches where players have picked up back and hamstring niggles and I feel that it gives us an extra 1 per cent that might make a difference.”
Dowie endured a summer of sleepless nights when his team were relegated from the Barclays Premiership on the final day of last season and a poor start to this season, compounded by the loss of Andrew Johnson, the England forward, for two months because of a knee injury, forced the Palace manager to go back to the drawing board and change the way that his team play. Palace may not always be pleasing on the eye any more, but they have become hard to beat.
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“We’ve got our consistency back, but I don’t want to overreact,” Dowie said. “I had a staff meeting this week and I told them that it is now that we have to kick on, this is the time to find the extra 1 per cent to make the difference.”
Palace have lost only one league game since the 2-0 defeat away to Luton Town two months ago, which according to Simon Jordan, the Palace chairman, was the worst display that he had seen from his team since he took the club out of administration six years ago.
“I was appalled — Luton beat us up,” Jordan said. “I didn’t want to rush into the dressing-room because that’s not my job, but we were struggling to adjust to the first division. We are a very good team and if you let us play, we will beat you; but if you rattled us, we found it difficult to adjust.”
Jordan had declared his team certainties to win the Championship before they lost 3-2 at the Madejski Stadium in September but an erratic performance that night by Brian Curson, the referee, means that the game is still remembered for the wrong reasons.
The chairman was charged with misconduct by the FA after singling out Curson as “someone who should not be in charge of top-level football games” in a newspaper article, and Dowie was sent off and received a one-match touchline ban and a £3,000 fine for swearing at the fourth official.
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“I never comment on referees because I watched myself on tape once when I was the Oldham manager and it was embarrassing,” Dowie said. “I am very passionate and committed, but ranting and raving doesn’t change anything.”
Palace are 25 points behind Reading, but victory tonight would close the gap between the South London club and Sheffield United, who are second, to 13 points. While Dowie rules out catching the leaders, he has the second automatic promotion place in his sights. “We have to go on a good run and Sheffield United have to slip up,” Dowie said, “but we believe that we are a good side and we want to flourish and finish the season by playing good football. We are not giving up.”