Sky show where their priorities lie as Palace are saved

As if I needed any more proof that Sky couldn't care less, today they showed their true colours.

As everybody knows, CPFC was close to being entered into liquidation today. Yesterday, at 1PM, it emerged that the CPFC 2010 consortium had been set a deadline of 3PM today to agree an anti-embarrassment clause with Lloyds Bank, who owned the ground. The two parties had agreed a fee for Selhurst Park, but Lloyds wanted an over-the-top anti-embarrassment fee. The anti-embarrassment fee is in place to stop CPFC 2010 from selling the ground on to developers and making a profit, thus embarrassing the Bank. However, Lloyd's wanted a ridiculous fee, and so there was a disagreement over said fee. As it was a bank holiday, no negotiations were taking place, so when this news came in it was quite a surprise.

Today, as 3PM approached, there had been whispers coming from London that we may be saved, however nothing concrete. More or less the whole day Sky had been switching between England World Cup squad announcements and Palace updates, so it was expected this would continue. However, at 3PM, Georgie Thompson and Sky seemed to forget that Palace existed, not for the first time I hasten to add, and instead decided to speculate on who will be on the plane to South Africa, leaving thousands of Palace fans in the dark.

However, I can sort of understand this, as more people support England than Palace, but it baffles me how speculation over who will be making it on the plane to South Africa is more important than the existence of a 105 year old football club.

But the blame for this top tier love in does not go to Sky. This year, despite the BBC denying it favoured the Premier League massively over what was then the Coca-Cola Championship, Newcastle proved this not to be the case when they featured in most of the Beeb's live games, and were almost always the main game on the Football League show. 

Since the Premier League was incepted in 1992, the so-called Promised Land has grown farther and farther away from the league below it, and as a result many many teams now find themselves in difficult financial trouble, Palace and Portsmouth being the most famous and worst of these. Sky have inflated the effect that promotion to the Premier League has on a club, and so now a club over spends and when they come back down have nothing to fall back on.

Being a Palace fan I felt the pain that administration and the threat of liquidation can bring, and really hope that something happens that helps close the gap, because they way we are going, sooner or later there will be no npower Championship for teams to be relegated into.

Gibbo