When we watch a game involving Crystal Palace, we find ourselves inexorably drawn to Alan Pardew. We observe him prowling his technical area, roving about with impossible confidence and slick, snake-hipped grace. For the majority of the time, he is an enigma, an inscrutable silver fox who spends his time scribbling hieroglyphs on his little notepad and smoothing back his expertly manicured hair. There comes a point in every match, however, when we get a glimpse of the actual Pardew. For a moment, a few fleeting seconds, the facade slips, and he reveals the true nature of his soul.Take, for instance, this Vine from the spring of 2015. With a chorus of Palace fans cheering his name, Pardew decided that they needed a conductor. Standing proud, reaching up towards the heavens, he began to wave to and fro over the melodic strains of 'Super Alan Pardew'. For those few seconds, he was football's answer to Hector Berlioz; Arturo Toscanini reborn on the sidelines of Selhurst Park.Now, it would be easy to interpret this as a sign of conceitedness. It would be easy to imagine Alan Pardew, going round the supermarket, humming 'Super Alan Pardew' to himself while picking up his weekly shop. The simple answer would be to pigeonhole Alan Pardew as the sort of bloke who sings his own name, who calls himself "the king" while snaffling other people's dinners, a man who could well be convinced to get a 'Super Alan Pardew' tattoo on his arse cheek before exposing it in the dressing room after Palace's match against Sunderland on Saturday.We think there's more to Alan Pardew than sheer self-adulation, however. On a fundamental level, Pardew simply does not give a miniscule, microscopic fuck. If he comes across as a raging egomaniac, that's only because he's refusing to live by society's rules, by the norms and mores that define the rest of us. He is a one-man protest movement against conformity, a champion of the individual and the right of self-expression. It just so happens that he, the individual, likes to express himself by conducting an orchestra of people singing his name. If there's somebody out there who doesn't like it, well, in the words of Alan himself: they can shut their noise, the fucking old cunts.
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