Steve Parish can shout all he wants but it’s down to the players to keep Crystal Palace up, writes Harry Redknapp

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Harry Redknapp9 February 2017

Steve Parish can walk into the dressing room after matches all he wants but it won’t have a positive effect on Crystal Palace.

As chairman, he obviously wasn’t happy with what he saw after losing 4-0 at home to Sunderland last weekend but he can talk to them about the duty they have to the club, how they have to do better and justify their money or whatever until he’s blue in the face. It isn’t anything the players won’t have heard before.

Does he not think Sam Allardyce has told them all that already? That’s what he’s there to do. I’m sure Alan Pardew would have been saying the same thing for a year while results weren’t any good.

The board have put their money where their mouth is in recent windows, having spent £27million on Christian Benteke and £14m on Patrick van Aanholt.

Steve is very passionate about the club, he’s worked hard to get it to this level and he doesn’t want to see it slipping away.

He’ll think, ‘I’m not going to just sit here and do nothing — I want to say my piece’ but he isn’t the first chairman to do it and I doubt it is going to make any difference aside from making him feel better.

In Pictures | Crystal Palace vs Sunderland | 4/02/2017

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They had no choice but to cancel their trip to Duba next weeki after last weekend’s result, especially with them being 4-0 down at half-time.

It was beyond belief as it had taken Sunderland nine previous away games to score as many goals.

What you have to look at is those fans who were there on Saturday, paying good money to see their team lose 4-0 in an embarrassing performance, picking up the newspaper and see the team is jetting off to Dubai. They’ll think, ‘Hang on, this isn’t right’.

I can understand exactly where they are coming from. I would have cancelled the trip as well, because you are leaving yourself wide open as a manager and a club to be taking them away off the back of a 4-0 defeat. You are asking for trouble.

They can say, ‘Well, we are going out there to train’ and, of course, they are but there’s also the sunshine, a beautiful hotel and on the whole it is a very nice trip. Do they deserve that after getting beaten 4-0? Not a chance.

You invite massive criticism for that, so you can’t do it. Sam may have been the one who wanted to cancel it but there was no need to damage his relationship with the players, so it was probably better coming from Steve.

Getting the players in at 7am after the game was a statement from Sam, showing the fans that he is taking their situation seriously.

It’ll be hurting him because everyone will have expected him to come in and sort things out straight away. But it is rarely that easy — especially when you consider the rut Palace have been in for ages.

They were the worst team in the calendar year of 2016 across all four divisions. There has to be something fundamentally wrong there. In the end, you can keep talking and talking but the players are responsible for the mess they are in.

Crystal Palace chairman, Steve Parish Photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images
Glyn Kirk/AFP/Getty Images

Sam has got it all on to try to sort things out. They go to Stoke on Saturday, which is never easy, but I’m sure Sam will go with the same way he played against Bournemouth, which was to play three big lads at the back.

He knows if Peter Crouch is playing, although Stoke don’t play as direct as they used to under Tony Pulis, they will still hit him early with balls into the box and they have some others who are strong in the air. Maybe it will help them playing away from home because in London their confidence seems to be shot.

They should get out of trouble because, man for man, they have a decent side. You’d take their forward line any day of the week. With Benteke, Wilfried Zaha and Andros Townsend, they should have more than enough to get out of it, but the players have to show the right attitude from the start against Stoke, especially after they fell apart so badly last weekend.

Sam will have organised them all week and drilled into them what an opportunity it was to play the bottom team at home and they just didn’t turn up. Sometimes you can’t account for that. Managers or chairmen can talk forever — it is on the players to take their share of responsibility for the situation now.

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