He knows how to win ugly

Keeping Crystal Palace in the Premiership? It’s not rocket science, is it?

Selhurst Park coach Iain Dowie (39) is perfectly placed to respond to such clichéd rhetoric. He’s got a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, which, I guess, might enable a football manager to put something other than a football into orbit.

So to avoid allowing Palace to go straight back down to whence they came from (as they have on their last three rocket trips into the stratosphere they call the Premiership), he will need knowledge on propulsion after what was a very sticky launch.

Palace started off as expected following the play-off victory over West Ham, which saw them sneak in to the top flight last May.

Three successive defeats left them rock-bottom. After a defeat against Middlesbrough in August, Palace’s Aussie fullback Tony Popovic said: ‘We put a lot into it, so to lose was harder to take than our other defeats. We tried to protect the lead too early.”

That’s not rocket science.

They were bumbling along at the bottom with just a single point from their opening draw again at Norwich after further defeats against Portsmouth and Manchester City when Hartlepool came visiting in the Carling Cup and a welcome but meaningless victory was finally achieved. A draw against Villa and a first Premiership win against Fulham came after that, courtesy of goals from Finnish finisher Aki Riihilati and a certain Andrew Johnson.

And here we come to the nub of the matter. Johnson is a seriously important part of Dowie’s rocket. This is a man with an uncanny knack for goals, even in a team that struggles for chances, talent and points.

At Birmingham he scored eight goals in 44 full appearances and 39 as a sub. At Palace, he has 46 from 79 league starts. This season he had eight in 12 games, putting him right up there with Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and Thierry Henry.

And when the doomed Gary Megson’s awful West Brom came visiting on October 23, Johnson’s double in a 3-0 win had manager Dowie calling for an England call-up for his unheralded Bedford-born 23-year-old.

Since then they have managed a win at his old club Birmingham and a 1-1 draw against Arsenal, which might have been even more astonishing had Vassilis Lakis not missed an unbelievably open goal. Dowie said afterwards: ‘Lakis was unlucky not to get the winner, but I have missed easier chances than that before!”

Now they are 16th, looking down on West Brom, Southampton, Norwich and Blackburn.

But Dowie’s rocket-science-like problem is this: What does he do in January when the transfer window opens and the big guns come in for Johnson? Liverpool have already made noises, Spurs may be interested, too, if they ever recover from Jacques Santini’s shock departure.

With the club far from financially secure, does he sell and invest the money wisely? Or does he hold on to his best asset and hope to survive?

As a player, Dowie took a lot of stick. Described as a man unlikely to be offered a modelling contract, he started life as a striker with outer-London club Hendon in 1987.

He broke through into the professional ranks at Luton, who signed him for £30 000, scored 16 goals in 66 appearances, didn’t enjoy a loan spell at Fulham (one goal in five games) and first went to West Ham for £450 000 (four goals in 12 games), but was only there for a couple of months before he went off to Southampton in 1991.

It was on the south coast that he achieved his best stats, scoring 30 goals in three-and-a-half years and 122 games before going to Palace in 1995, the first of a series of £500 000.

He scored six goals in 19 games there, but soon went back to West Ham, struggled (eight in 59 games), and ended up as player-manager with QPR’s reserves.

In all, he made 279 league starts, scored 68 goals and appeared as a sub 45 times.

But it was that final spell at West Ham that nearly ruined him, as he failed to find the net and was lampooned for being ugly and useless.

And so the great step up the ladder to management after running the QPR reserves and going to Oldham Athletic as assistant manager when his playing career ended.

He did great things for poverty-stricken Oldham after his appointment as manager in November 2001, sending them to the play-off semifinals in his first season. Then they got into real trouble and Dowie found himself working without a contract for months before being tempted back to the capital in December last year to pick up the pieces at Palace, who weren’t much better off.

His impact was immediate. Palace, heading for relegation under previous boss Steve Kember, surged up the Division One table and ended up sneaking in to the play-offs, breaking records on the way.

There is no question Dowie’s done a great job. But if he doesn’t keep them in the Premiership, serious problems loom, with club owner Simon Jordan endlessly threatening to withdraw his favours.

Dowie has done all he could. He brought in Rugby League fitness coach John Harbin to turn his players in to supermen. He signed eight players during the summer, and struggled manfully to convince the likes of Kily Gonzalez and Sorondo Gonzalo to forsake Inter Milan’s San Siro for the rough-and-tumble of south London suburb Selhurst.

He admits: ‘There are other sides who are far better equipped to deal with this level than us who aren’t coming up with the results. I’m trying to make the players better, and they gave me everything they had.”

Having taken 10 points from their past five games, he grins: ‘I was delighted with our performance against Arsenal … That’s what we’re here for — a full house and to compete with the likes of Arsenal.”

Long may it continue, Iain. And by the way, you ain’t as bad looking as they say. Or so my daughter says.

And anyway, winning ugly is not such a great sin.