HOW quickly fortunes can change. Just as their last match turned in the space of seven calamitous minutes for Crystal Palace, so Dave Bassett's team have seen their chances of returning to the Premier League slump alarmingly in the last two months.
Early in November, Palace were second in the First Division, the country's leading scorers and an apparently sound bet for an automatic promotion place.
Yet the latest defeat at Selhurst Park, 2-1 against Portsmouth, completed a 10-match run in which they have taken just seven points and won only once. Eighth in the table, they now trail the leaders, Bolton Wanderers, by 18 points.
Added to that are worrying disciplinary problems, including a Football Association charge following a mass brawl at Norwich last month. Three players have been suspended in recent weeks and on Saturday it needed the intervention of colleagues to separate Andy Roberts and Dean Gordon when they squared up to each other in a row over responsibility for Portsmouth's second goal.
Bassett, who dismissed that incident as 'just an emotional thing', said afterwards that he still believes Palace are 'on our day, better than anything else in this division'.
Those days, however, have become few and far between and Bassett's numerous changes - the latest was to switch from a 3-5-2 formation to 4-3-3 - have failed to halt a sequence of defensive errors.
