A Pair of Twitts

Crystal Palace 0-1 Norwich City

Another pre-season friendly and another win. I would like to tell you more and wax lyrical about Simon Whaley's goal and the all-round performance of the team but I wasn't at the game. A week-long stint presenting BBC Radio Norfolk's breakfast show kept me away from a Tuesday night out at Selhurst Park.

It was odd knowing that Norwich City were playing and I wasn't there but it did make me realise how things have moved on. I spent much of the evening sitting in front of my computer at home waiting for the EDP's football writer Chris Lakey to post goal updates on twitter.

I couldn't help but wonder what the 10-year-old me would have made of all this. I have vivid memories of sitting in the front room on Saturday afternoons (after Saint and Greavsie) glued to the TV and waiting for ceefax to bring me news of the canaries progress away from home. The lack of detail somehow added to the romance of the whole thing as you desperately hoped for words like 'Fleck 15' or 'Rosario 37' to appear underneath the name of Norwich City.

Tap-ins and 25-yard screamers were all treated exactly the same by what seemed like groundbreaking technology at the time. Scorers and minutes is all you would get when it was good news. Bad news could be brought to you in green text. Things like 'Gunn sent off' or 'Bowen missed pen' would have the young me practising whatever the nearest thing I knew to a swear word was.

Even during pre-season friendlies every bad challenge, missed open goal or substitution can now be brought to you immediately and you can even post a message to the reporter at the ground. Ceefax is clinging on by its clumsy, square, pixelated figure nails and in the-not-too-distant-future will seem as primitive as the telegram or the carrier pigeon does today.

Twitter isn't all good news though. I was planning to write about how Crystal Palace (a) wasn't a fixture I was sad to see disappearing from our calendar, despite the relegation.

Their ground, somewhere in the backstreets of Croydon, is tough to get to and the facilities leave plenty to be desired. I am usually careful not to carp-on about the tea or the sandwiches in the press rooms at grounds because when fans have had to pay £15 for the pleasure (!) of being allowed into a rickety old stadium it seems churlish to complain about the quality of the tea bags or the lack of a comfy chair to sit on when you are effectively being paid to go and watch football.

I was planning to make an exception for Palace because I have been there as a 'real' Norwich fan and experienced the away end. It may come as a little consolation that it is no better 'behind the scenes'. One season we got there at about midday at which point the old boy in the press room started up the tea urn. It was eventually ready to drink at about five-to-two and it had that taste that you only get at football grounds. Teams of scientists have spent years in laboratories trying to re-create that football ground tea taste. It has to burn the roof of your mouth on contact and be about the same colour as David Dickinson. The choice at football is not tea or coffee it's light-brown water or dark-brown water. But we still drink it. It's part of going to the match.

I was going to write all that but my interest in this particular pre-season friendly didn't go unnoticed on Twitter. I am now being followed in twit-world by a group of people called cpfc.org - a Palace fans website. They have to go to Selhurst Park every week. There's always someone worse off than yourself.