[The Office. 10:30 BST.]
Dougie Freedman was already in my office when I came up.
He had the laptop open and a stack of paper thick enough to stop a bullet, and he was a Crystal Palace legend sitting in a Crystal Palace office doing a Crystal Palace job, which is exactly the sort of thing that does not happen at other clubs and the sort of thing that is the whole point of this one. Dougie scored the goal that kept this club in the division on the last day of the season in 2001.
Eighty-seventh minute. Stockport. There are men in their fifties in Croydon who will buy you a pint to this day for the privilege of telling you where they were standing when Dougie Freedman scored that goal. Now he was our sporting director, and he had been since the summer, and he did the job the way a man does a job when the badge on the wall is the badge he bled for.
