Four Four Two - UK (2021-12)

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good summer holidays as a pro! They were

all very different scenarios. At Palace I wasn’t

a star player and hadn’t been there too long

when we went down. Personally I did well for

Ipswich, but we had such a small squad and

European matches to juggle. At Wimbledon

we had many injuries, and so on. If you play

in the Premier League for several years and

aren’t at one of the top seven clubs, the odds

are you’ll get relegated at some point. It just

happened a lot to me!

You share the record with former striker

Nathan Blake. Do you wish you’d suffered

relegation once more, to own it outright?

Of course not, no. If you look at the ratio of

seasons to relegations, I’m nowhere near the

worst. I think there’s a few players who have

been relegated in three of their four Premier

League seasons, so I’m not the winner really.

You netted in the famous 7-4 ding-dong

between Portsmouth and Reading in 2007.

Did you lose count of the score at times?

The funny thing is, we kept a record amount

of clean sheets that season. We went 2-0 up,

then suddenly it was 2-2 and we just had to

go for it. It was crazy after that. My goal, our

third, summed that match up. Sylvain Distin,

a centre-back, crossed it in and I, a full-back,

headed it home. What the hell was going on?

You won the FA Cup with Pompey in 2008,

a strange year in which all the traditional

big guns exited early. What was that like?

Growing up in Iceland, we followed English

football and the FA Cup final was the biggest

match we’d get to watch all year. So it was

Interview Ed McCambridge

The Premier League bad luck

charm remembers anguish

aplenty and FA Cup triumph

TEAMS

IBV

Crystal Palace

Brentford

Wimbledon

Ipswich

Charlton

Portsmouth

Coventry

Fylkir

Iceland

You signed for Crystal Palace in 1997 after

five seasons as a professional in Iceland.

How did you initially find English football?

At the time, football was an amateur sport in

Iceland, so it was a big step up. I was on the

bench for the first game of the season away

at Everton, with 40,000 fans in the stadium.

I’d never experienced such an atmosphere

before and was very impressed; I just wanted

to sit and take it all in. I had to work hard and

put in a lot of extra hours at the gym to make

HERMAnn HREIDARSSOn

“IT’S REALLY THE

WORST THInG TO

GET RELEGATED –

I HAD VERY FEW

GOOD SUMMERS!”

sure I could compete in the Premier League.

I also remember thinking it was pretty warm

in England. On the first day of the season, it

was 30 degrees during the match. [Laughs]

I don’t think it’s ever been that hot in Iceland!

After Palace got relegated, you signed for

Brentford in the third tier. Why choose to

drop down two divisions?

[Laughs] It was a really dumb move, I guess.

I didn’t have an agent and Palace’s chairman,

Ron Noades, had just sold the club and taken

over as manager at Brentford. He and I had

a great relationship, so I thought, ‘Why not?’

It was a stupid decision but also one of the

best I made, because I had a great time and

we won the league. I enjoyed my time there.

You later joined Ipswich and qualified for

the UEFA Cup in your first season, before

getting relegated again in your second.

What went wrong?

It was a strange couple of years. In the first

season we started well and just kept going,

finishing only three points off a Champions

League spot. But our squad was too small to

fight on both fronts and we picked up nine

points from our opening 17 league games of

2001-02. After going out of Europe we won

seven games out of eight, but couldn’t keep

up that form and dropped out of the league.

You’ve been relegated from the Premier

League five times – a joint record – despite

being a fan favourite nearly everywhere

you went. Were you just a bad luck charm?

It’s the worst thing in the world when you’re

relegated. Let’s just say I didn’t enjoy many