Latest news with #SelhurstPark
Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- Sport
- Daily Mail
Crystal Palace FA Cup trophy parade: Thousands of fans line the streets in south London - as Oliver Glasner and his side head to Selhurst Park to celebrate historic title
As the Crystal Palace buses carrying their FA Cup heroes reached the corner of Whitehorse Lane and Park Road, and Selhurst Park came into view, the grey clouds finally gave way and the rain began to fall. The thousands who lined the narrow roads leading to the stadium pulled up their hoods and wrapped flags around their necks to guard them from the elements. A few even stuck plastic shopping bags over their heads as they waited for the coaches to come past. Nothing, though, was going to dampen this party. Blue and red flare smoke filled the air. Children hung from lampposts and stood on garden walls, craning their necks to get a glimpse of their champions. A dad hoisted his daughter on to his shoulders, her pig tails held together with red and blue ties. A couple of locals perched themselves on their roof, perched on the open bedroom windows. On the top of the coaches, a beaming Oliver Glasner clutched the FA Cup trophy in his hands. Will Hughes partied with a scarf around his head a bottle in his hand. Ismaila Sarr wore a bucket hat and waved his flag, Jefferson Lerma set off his own red flare. Dean Henderson grabbed the microphone and sang Palace's anthem Glad All Over. When everyone eventually made it inside Selhurst Park for their 'party on the pitch', the goalkeeper led a more sober reworking of Shakira 's hit Waka Waka than the one he performed in the celebrations after the Wembley final. 'We finished 12th, who gives a f***…we won the FA Cup!' This is a feeling none of the thousands of fans here have experienced before, celebrating the club's first ever major trophy after Eberechi Eze's goal secured a 1-0 win over Manchester City Street vendors flogging t-shirts, scarves and bucket hats did a roaring trade. The sound of vuvuzelas rang out like it was the 2010 World Cup. One man carried a cardboard cut-out of Glasner lifting the FA Cup down Whitehorse Lane, prompting a chorus of 'We've got Super Ollie Glasner' from those along the road. Mail Sport spent the day among the jubilant Palace supporters, many of whom never expected these days to come. 'I never thought it would happen,' admitted 83-year-old James Pickard, who has followed the club for 75 years, here with two of his sons and three grandchildren. Another man in his late 60s wiped tears away as he admitted never belived this day would come. Wherever you looked, you saw Palace fans from all generations, from every background, celebrating together. All of them united by their region and their club. 'That's what's special about South London – all races, creeds and religions,' added his son Stephen. One fan strode towards the ground in his Palace shirt with 'grandad' written on the back, a present from his daughter, who suffered a still birth in February. 'I'll wear it with pride,' he said. Another Palace supporter called Dan stood on a wall next to Mail Sport while waiting for the buses and told how he'd endured a power cut 83 minutes into watching the FA Cup final and only regained it as the game went into stoppage time. 'It was probably less stressful,' he added. On the train earlier, father and daughter Andy and Ruby were ready to celebrate. Ruby wrapped herself in a Columbia flag in honour of defender Daniel Munoz, her favourite player, who was later named the club's player of the season. Andy has spent every day since the win checking the list of teams who Palace could play in the Europa League. 'If Tottenham can win it, we can,' declared another supporter marching towards Selhurst Park. Later in the day, when the players took to the stage in front of thousands of fans on the Selhurst Park pitch for the end-of-season awards, Glasner spoke with the same ambition. 'We all will enjoy this journey, playing the Premier League, playing the Carabao Cup, playing the FA Cup and now playing the Europa League. Four competitions, four titles to win, let's go for every single one,' said Glasner, who gave no indication he would be saying goodbye to the Palace project just yet. Palace chairman Steve Parish echoed those sentiments. 'Winning is a drug. There's no reason we can't do it again. The manager is already preparing for next season. There is no respite for anyone. We need to deliver in the close season for the manager and we are going to try to push on.' When you've never done anything like this before in your 120-year professional history, you can't expect everything to run smoothly. There was some disappointment that the short parade route, consisting just three roads around the stadium, had not been extended to include Crystal Palace Park, the club's old home and former host of the FA Cup final, but disagreements between the club and the local authorities meant it was not able to be organised in time. A delay to the start of the parade also left fans stood around for longer than expected and some followed BBC News coverage on their phones to see how far away the coaches were. One lad got caught by a false alarm and let off his flare far too early. But like Palace's long quest for a trophy, it got there in the end and was well worth the wait.
BBC News
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The party continues in south London
We asked you to send in your pictures from Crystal Palace's FA Cup victory parade and party at Selhurst are some of your images:
BBC News
23-05-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Crystal Palace FA Cup victory parade and party confirmed
Crystal Palace have announced plans for a day of celebrations following last weekend's FA Cup victory - their first major coming bank holiday, Monday 26 May, the team is to show off the trophy to fans during an open-top bus victory parade starting at the top of Whitehorse Lane at 13:00 BST and ending at Selhurst will be followed by a "party on the pitch" inside the stadium, starting at 14:30. The stadium event will only be open to ticket holders. Tickets are free but must be booked in are not required for the victory parade. How to get tickets Tickets are available for the event inside the stadium to season ticket-holders and tickets will be available for the general public to book online on the club's website from 17:00 on can either book standing tickets on the pitch, or seats in the main stand. Victory parade route The route will proceed down Whitehorse Lane, and then turn left, going around the the eastern edge of the stadium, first along Park Road and then Holmesdale Road and ending at a stadium is expected to take about 45 minutes. The 'party on the pitch' Following the parade, the ticketed event inside the stadium will begin at 14: will include live entertainment, special guests and end-of-season awards, the club and drink will be on sale.
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lines of disappointment etched into Spurs fans' faces evaporate into the Bilbao air
I didn't really cry until Son Heung-min was handed the trophy – the camera hadn't cut to him enough at full time. Of all the players who look sad when they're sad, Sonny really looks sad. Building up to the Europa League final all I could imagine was a disconsolate South Korean walking around the pitch applauding mournfully. The Harry Kane walk. His smile when shiny-shoed Aleksander Ceferin hands him the trophy broke me. Apparently the Uefa Cup weighs 15kg – the same as my three-year-old. That trophy certainly looked lighter than when young Ian demands to be carried home from the park. As a very sleep-deprived middle-aged dad of young kids, the emotion of football back home hits a lot harder than it used to. I found myself weeping at the videos of Crystal Palace fans after the FA Cup final. Someone focused from person to person, pausing for just enough time on each of them to give you the impression that you could see the etched lines of disappointment they'd experienced over the years just evaporating into the air. It cuts to a couple probably in their 60s. She's in a Crystal Palace shirt, cartoon-shuddering up and down in tears, being pulled into a protective embrace by, I presume, her partner. Big grey beard, dressed like he's off to the garden centre, he holds her close and stares into the distance. The hug unfurls and she wipes away a tear. Maybe they'd only just met – it's a time to hug strangers – but I'd like to think these two have had a Selhurst Park routine for decades, struggling to process what was happening in front of them. At full time in Bilbao one camera is trained on a section of the Spurs support. It focuses on an old guy, Spurs shirt over his jumper – the sensible way to dress for a summer evening game. The whistle blows and he is enveloped by a younger guy, his son you'd imagine. The camera pans left, and in and out of shot is the bald crown of a man bent double, weeping – bleating even – into his Spurs scarf. As I wrote a few months ago after that James Tarkowski goal led one Evertonian to wave the corner flag over his head like a drunk pole vaulter, how lucky that something exists capable of liberating such happiness. Perhaps the first column I wrote for the Guardian was about Spurs reaching the Champions League final after that breathless night in Amsterdam in 2019 – and realising in the exhausting tearful aftermath that despite having a ticket, I needed to watch the game with my dad. Who knew writing an article about loving football and your relationship with your father would resonate? If we're honest, my dad was less bothered about the whole affair than I was. Now 10,000 miles away in Melbourne, flying back for the game seemed a stretch. A lot of the week was stressing about finding my parents a TNT Sports login. 'Eureka,' Dad WhatsApped on Wednesday afternoon. 'Game tonight shown free for Virgin customers.' Perhaps the biggest hurdle overcome. The second half consisted mainly of messages of increasing desperation at how deep the Spurs defence were getting, working out how many goals we needed before we could relax. We settled on four. 'This might be a long 20 minutes.' 'It's already lasted 30.' 'Agony.' Weirdly the post-game call might have been the first which didn't end up extolling the merits of Jimmy Greaves. Watching from Australia at 5am, part of the emotion is clearly tangled up in a homesickness that hits you at moments when you feel like you're in the wrong place, even if you know you're in the right place for many more important, prosaic, life reasons. But you could feel the reflected pride in the country. ABC breakfast radio (basically the Today programme) rang me for an interview while I was walking a pram up Northcote High Street at 8.15am. A man in full Spurs kit pushing a pram on the other side of the road cheered in my direction. There is no objectivity here – we are all just a tapestry of our own biases – but my happiness for Ange Postecoglou is almost as great as my happiness for the club. This gruff, Greece-born Aussie is loved here for what he has achieved in the game; people (and not just football fans) are calling it the greatest achievement by an Australian coach in any sport. He did it in the most demonstrably unequivocally un-Angeball way. Perhaps if Spurs had defended like that for a few games this season his job wouldn't be under threat. The change from the high line, heart-stopping playing out, full-backs seemingly always out of position to this dogged, shithousing, controlled bus-parking over the final and the away games in Bodø and Frankfurt. All part of the plan, Ange claimed afterwards. It felt weirdly refreshing to see Guglielmo Vicario getting it launched and Sonny tucking in at left-back. Antonio Conte and José Mourinho would be proud. One of the beauties of an early, early kick-off is that you can spend the whole day letting it sink in, and satiating the thirst for content. Watching the full time whistle over and over again, watching entire press conferences, actually enjoying X. The Ange biographer and Sydney Morning Herald football correspondent Vince Rugari had kept his receipts: going through the most over-the-top posts about how out of his depth Postecoglou is over the past year or so, and quoting them with increasingly smug petty satisfaction. One of the great uses of social media. But to write off Postecoglou's previous achievements is to write off football in Australia, in Japan, in Scotland. A man who arrived in Melbourne as a five-year-oldwith his family and nothing else … that he has ended up being managed by Ferenc Puskas, becoming a coach, winning and winning and winning and landing a European trophy is inspirational. In the same way Palace winning the FA Cup is good for English football, Ange winning the Europa League is good for the world game. Even if he might have gone by the time you read this, I hope he stays. Yes Erik ten Hag won the FA Cup and Manchester United stayed hopeless. But Spurs aren't United. Despite being 'my big team that win things', they don't win things. Any trophy with Spurs should be rewarded. A Tottenham fan called Bert messaged me on Instagram at 3.30am Spanish time with a question for the Guardian Football Weekly podcast. 'Why are there no cabs in Bilbao?' A glorious image, wandering the streets, staring at anything moving that might be a taxi, finally seeing one and the light's off and it's full, walking again, but all the while safe in the knowledge that it has been zero days since Spurs won a trophy.
BBC News
22-05-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
'Catching up to midfield group will require a busy summer'
One problem with 'dead' games at the end of the season - aside from the unsatisfactory description - is that the apparently low stakes leave too much time for wandering thoughts, reading things between the lines of the teamsheet that might not be after the team news dropped at Selhurst Park, it was tempting to look for deeper meaning in it, especially bearing in mind that Vitor Pereira had said he would not be giving "gifts" of places in the team to fringe players as some sort of thanks for training patiently in the background."It is time to understand what they can give to us," Pereira told me afterwards, and that seems a perfectly sensible use of the last week of the season in the circumstances, notwithstanding the financial value of every position in the final are scrutinised in training as never before, but the best way to measure the progress that, for example, Nasser Djiga has made since joining the club was to give him his first Premier League start. It is by no means certain that even the 'strongest available' team would have won anyway, against a confident Crystal Palace Pereira learned about individual players, the past two games have at least indicated the scale of the work to be done to meet the ambitions he shares with the supporters. As Pereira pointed out recently, their past three opponents of the season - Brighton, Palace and Brentford - are all in the bracket of clubs he believes Wolves should be capable of have been quite comfortably outpointed by the first two. "They have tactical quality and they have very good players - that's why they did the season that they did and we must be in our best level," said Pereira in the Selhurst Park media room, regretting his team's games, then, are 'dead' only in the sense of no overall jeopardy. For all the players given a rare opportunity, they are very much live - their best chance to show Pereira there is no need to buy a new starter in that the manager really, as I heard it suggested later, have selected a team to make a point to his employers about the need to spend? It seems unlikely he would need to do that. But the past two games - and the league table, with 12 clubs now over 50 points - suggest the midfield group has become stronger this season, and catching up will require a busy to full commentary of Wolves v Brentford at 16:00 BST on Sunday on BBC Radio WM [DAB Black Country]Tune into The West Midlands Football Phone-In from 18:00 on weeknights
