'Jordan's book forgets my dodgy fanzine moment'
THIS week former Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan released his much-anticipated autobiography, where he promised to lift the lid on the murky world of football. And he certainly does that – even if he does it mostly by referring to himself in the third person, making terrible wisecracks and reminding us how much money he put in.
So to celebrate here is a story of my own from my one and only dealing with 'Mr Orange'. And we didn't even meet.
Back in 2007, fans were getting restless, Palace weren't playing brilliantly and there were whispers of financial problems at the club. Jordan's relationship with the fans was falling apart.
Probably not helped by my fanzine Five Year Plan running a regular cartoon with Jordan as one of the Mr Men, called Mr Orange (essentially a giant orange ball with long blonde hair and sunglasses) getting into monthly misdemeanours.
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One match day I rocked up with my dad to sell copies of the fanzine about 45 minutes before kick-off only to be met by a beefy police officer at the top of the Holmesdale.
"How can I be of service, officer?" I asked in my politest voice (like I'd seen in the films).
He proceeded to tell me there had been a "call of complaint" from the club about two people selling fanzines on Holmesdale Road without a licence for an hour.
"But we only just got here," I replied. We were late as we'd stopped for a pre-match pint. Professional.
We were moved on as I couldn't prove I had a licence, which it turned out we didn't need as local laws protected street sellers of printed things (Big Issue, etc).
So for the next game my dad printed out the exact bit of the law in case they tried to stop us again.
Weirdly, we never heard from them again.
Most disappointingly this little run-in wasn't mentioned in the book. Devastated.
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