Sometimes you get the feeling that football is on the brink of disappearing up its own backside without so much as a trace of self-awareness. Prima donnas will bemoan getting paid a measly £60,000 a week, fans will swing from venom to adulation and back to vitriol depending on the score, and nobody has any sense that everyone talks in cliches and riddles all the time. It's a fantasist's dream, which is precisely why it's so good as escapism. And while some cliches are blindly accepted - players talking about it being a game of two halves, saying no one man is bigger than a club, and pretending that loyalty actually exists - some are becoming horribly tiresome. And that's where the old Alan Pardew excuse comes into focus. On the face of it, Newcastle's 3-3 draw at home to Crystal Palace was not catastrophic: the team bossed possession, had a massive number of chances, and played some good football. Unfortunately they also defended like a bus load of pensioners at times, but a point is a point, even if an increasingly vocal element of the fan base are calling for Pardew's head. But then in the aftermath of the game, the manager who seems so fond of offering excuses, rather than simply analysing his team's performance or actually addressing real problems (like signing a centre-half or a centre-forward), he decided to suggest that the problem might have been the crowd's excitement. First he said this...
"We weren't as tight defensively today as we have been and Palace caused us problems in wide areas."
Spot on - Newcastle were murdered on the break and didn't defend set-pieces, which has been a problem for three years, and Sissoko playing in centre-midfield left a major hole in front of defence that Palace exploited. But then he had to go and say this...
"We should have had three points. Perhaps we got wrapped up in the crowd trying to get a fourth and it's frustrating to concede."
Really? The fans - whose attempts to make the team play better, or stop hitting long balls to Mike Williamson at every single set-piece fall on deaf ears - were to blame for getting the team over-excited? Isn't it the manager's job to control the team, and to make sure they aren't over-awed by 50,000 voices berating and celebrating? It's baffling, and even if the manager does not deserve the criticism he's received openly on the back of today's result alone, it becomes increasingly difficult to defend any manager who makes statements like that. And it doesn't even matter if he comes out and qualifies what he meant, because it has been said now. Maybe it's time he just stopped going along to the post-match interviews.