The Assassination Bureau

Death becomes them. We can see the headlines now: ‘Sick fanzine advocates murder of innocent men!’ Innocent? Pah! This weekend Steve Bruce, one of many to have wronged the Palace, returns to Selhurst Park… some of us would like to see him endure a fitting end…

Go on admit it. You really shouldn’t because it’s not very nice and football is only a game after all, but have you ever had a secret fantasy where certain people have received a richly deserved comeuppance for crimes against Crystal Palace FC?

Ladies and gentlemen, we are a secret (well not quite so secret, now that we’ve told you) organisation dedicated to the elimination of enemies of CPFC. We are Crepe (the Committee for Revenge and the Elimination of Palace Enemies), also known as the Selhurst assassination bureau, and it is our job to avenge wrongdoing against our club and to impose the ultimate penalty for failure. We would like to share with you our secret list of targets. What do you mean, you already know who’s on it?

As you will see below, it is not our intention to merely gun down miscreants in the street. No, that would be positively vulgar. Our highly trained agents are in fact waiting to help the enemies of Crystal Palace make their exit in a more, shall we say, appropriate fashion.

We start our campaign of vengeance with none other than Mark Goldberg – the man who believed that everything he touched would turn to gold. And now it will, for just like Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger, he will die of asphyxiation from being covered in gold paint. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-haaaaahhhh, forgive us a cruel chuckle. Now we’re in the swing of things we must also send a message to inform you that Michele Padovano sleeps with the fishes.

Remember our chubby goalkeeper of that era, the one who let us down when others stood firm – some fans may throw pies at him, but we prefer to feed the bloater and keep feeding him until, like Mr Creosote in Life of Brian he simply explodes, so… ‘just one more wafer thin mint, Mr Kevin Miller?’

Who else is on the Crepe hitlist? I think you’ll enjoy seeing Uncle Ron Noades chewed up and spat out by a shark, very appropriate n'est-ce pas? Alan Mullery will be left dangling precariously over a precipice and then we’ll send the old and the frail like Ally Brown and Andy McCulloch to attempt a rescue.

Another disliked old boss, Terry Venables, will go like the bloodsucker he proved to be – a stake through the heart as in Nosferatu: ‘And at that moment, as if by a miracle, the sick no longer died, and the stifling shadow of the vampire vanished with the morning sun.’ That should cure us of him.

Easington beach 1970 – Get Cantona… one blow to the head with a sawn off shotgun: ‘Goodbye, Eric!’. For David Mellor, Chelsea supporting, Evening sub-Standard writing, accursed smug aristo it can only be a trip to Madame La Guillotine, for Brian Horton we reckon an encounter with Zombies a la Day of the Living Dead, which is all things Brighton in a nutshell, and that leaves us with Steve ‘Mr Loyalty’ Bruce himself, we feel that the scissors scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder could be just perfect… stabbed in the back, very apt.

Eagle Eye – a brief history of the Palace fanzine

Eagle Eye’s founder John Ellis explains how the fanzine sprang to life in the late 1980s


I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be when, in October 1987, I wandered into Norwood boozers flogging the first issue of Eagle Eye.

For 30p I was offering 16 pages of loosely typed photocopied ramblings, hoping that it might strike a chord with other people who felt about football, and more importantly Palace, the way that I did.

Although someone called me ‘Ron Noades’s son’, the reaction was remarkable. People wrote back amazed that there were other Palace fans out there who still cared for the club deeply and who retained, despite the living hell that was the first half of the 1980s, a sense of humour and perspective that was missing from just about every other aspect of football discussion.

Leading the way for the new fanzine ‘movement’ were the general magazines When Saturday Comes and Off the Ball. I did a few things for the former, but when I told its editor Mike Ticher that, really, all I knew about was Palace he encouraged me to start Eagle Eye. With the help of a Pritt stick, a dodgy typewriter and a couple of friends, things soon took on a life of their own.

For the next seven years, Eagle Eye blazed away at all the ills of football and gave many people an outlet not only for their frustrations but also to be creative.

The game was in a sorry state, no doubt, the media and the clubs themselves were clueless, and to admit to being a football supporter was akin to sending yourself to social Siberia (or, worse, Coventry). People genuinely assumed that you went off to war at weekends, when the reality was that you stood with your hands in your pockets on a half empty terrace, behind a big fence cursing the efforts of no-hopers like Tommy Langley and David Price.

It scarcely seems credible today that an entire nation has become so completely swept up in the game, there’s no escaping it and sometimes I think that’s not such a good thing. There’s saturation coverage that no politician or big brand can afford to ignore and yet, from a Palace point of view, we still have to put up with articles or hear pundits talking about us in a way that bears no relation to the way the fans view the club.

At times the fanzine sent the club, and particularly Noades, up the wall, but they couldn’t deny that it’s heart was pure Palace. Put simply, Eagle Eye followed by Palace Echo and now the BBS have given the fans a voice and, on reflection, the best thing they did with it was to identify for themselves what this club is all about… and it’s a damn sight more than just ‘winning is everything’.

This article first appeared in the book Palace Till I Die