Neil Warnock, the manager of Crystal Palace likes to think of himself as Marmite. He reckons you either love him or hate him. I think he is more like Gorgonzola. You try to like him but in the end he makes you sick.
Warnock is at his best in adversity and there is plenty of that about at Selhurst Park right now. The club has been placed in administration and a brief flirtation with the play-off places has quickly turned into a fight against relegation due to a ten point deduction. Warnock has been praised for the way he is battling the odds with a young side. A gutsy performance against Aston Villa in the FA Cup was typical of its resilience and Warnock risked being admired: right until a camera was pointed at him and he again revealed a deep unpleasantness.
Warnock referred to the match officials as a disgrace. He said they favoured the Premier League team, which impinged on their professional reputations, and he said a linesman, Trevor Massey, was incompetent and should be suspended. Massey's crime was that he had failed to spot that the ball had deflected off Aston Villa substitute Nathan Delfouneso when he gave the corner from which Villa equalised. Massey thought a save had been made by Julian Speroni, the Palace keeper. In slow motion, his error was clear; in real time, many would have made the same misjudgement,
For this, apparently, a decent man is inept, possibly corrupt and should be banned. As if Warnock never errs; as if the four Palace players - not including the goalkeeper - who were nearest to Stiliyan Petrov when he scored for Villa might not also have been in a position to limit the damage done by a linesman's bad call.
Nothing is Warnock's fault, though. The season he took Sheffield United down, his team won two of their last 11 games, a fact blamed on Carlos Tevez, the West Ham United striker. Warnock still goes on about this as if Tevez lost games for Sheffield United as well as winning them for West Ham. He blames Rafael Benitez and Sir Alex Ferguson for fielding weakened sides in crucial matches in that season, too: yet never mentions the weakened side he fielded against Manchester United, and lost. Not the same at all, apparently. It took Sharon, Warnock's wife, to remind him after his latest tirade that Crystal Palace's first goal in the previous round against Wolves came from a corner that should have been a goal-kick. Too late, the damage was done. Yet had Warnock introduced a little context to his initial complaint, he might have found a sympathetic ear. The nastiness of his attack on Massey, however, made it impossible. He may yet be charged by the Football Association over this, and many would welcome it, despite adding insult to injury. Warnock is that rare creature: an unlovable underdog.
This is how his mind works. When Palace went into administration, Paulo Sousa, the manager of Swansea City, said clubs in that position should suffer automatic relegation as punishment. Warnock has advocated this, too. Yet now Sousa was wrong. "I've always been a big backer of that argument," said Warnock, "but with us it's a different scenario."
Well, of course, it would be. Warnock's administration is different, his referees are different, his linesmen and even his weakened teams are different. He has different ways to lose matches and different injustices, created specifically for him. Indeed, everything is very different in Warnock's world, yet strangely enough, it is always the same old whine.