A weekly series revealing the club allegiances of English football fans.
Dave Tackney
Alarm technician
Crystal Palace
Fan since: 1970.
Favourite player: Ian Wright.
Greatest moment: Beating Liverpool in the 1990 FA Cup semifinal.
Been to Selhurst Park: Yes.
I had my best and worst moments as a Crystal Palace fan in the 1990 season.
We got beaten 9-0 by Liverpool, which was pretty gruesome.
But then we beat Liverpool to reach the FA Cup final.
Ian Wright is the greatest Palace player I've seen.
He scored a lot of goals.
Unfortunately, a lot were for Arsenal.
I went to two games at Selhurst Park last year - Palace against Hull, and Palace against Sheffield United.
It was my first trip to Britain and I was always going to go to a Palace game.
The ground couldn't have been further away from where I was staying.
It's quite a hard ground to get to at the best of times.
But it was worth it.
Selhurst Park was actually very similar to Carisbrook, I thought.
It's not super-flash.
You wouldn't call it one of the best grounds in the world.
They had crowds of about 17,000 when I was there.
A lot of people have a soft spot for Crystal Palace and I don't really know why.
There aren't a lot of diehard Palace supporters but there are a lot of people who still sort of like them.
I was actually an Arsenal supporter when I was a kid.
But they won a lot and I actually got bored with that.
I wanted a team where you wouldn't know what to expect from one week to the other.
I always go for the battler.
Any supporter of Otago rugby is like that.
Palace's first year in the first division was when I started following them.
I think they beat relegation by a point.
They're up and down like a yo-yo.
They have three or four seasons where they have a good run, then they play terribly.
Palace have had a lot of good players, guys like Kenny Sansom and Ian Wright and Gareth Southgate.
But just when they get good players together and look like they're going to be really successful, they trip up.
Don't ask me why.
There have probably been times where I should have just given up and followed another team.
But I'll always have a soft spot for Palace.
We started very badly this year with two losses and two draws.
We didn't even score a goal until the fourth game.
We're too good to be down the bottom of the Championship.
But we sure as hell aren't good enough to be in the Premier League.
- As told to Hayden Meikle.
