Ian Holloway says he was “totally shocked and in awe” of what Wilfried Zaha and Yannick Bolasie could do with a football when he took over as Crystal Palace manager.
Ian Holloway said “I’ll never forget when I first got there. We stayed overnight with one of the directors, and his son had on his bedroom wall a picture of Wilfried Zaha and writing above it that said: ‘He’s just too good for you. I went, ‘oh yeah, what’s all that about?’ He said: ‘Have you seen him?’ I said I’d seen him, but he can’t be that good, can he? And he went: ‘You wait.’ So the following day my first game was up in the stands. I sat up there against Blackburn Rovers and we ended up winning. At one point he flicked it up and over a very famous player and he was totally lost. He looked around and I’m not being funny, our crowd started to sing: ‘He’s just too good for you’, and Danny Murphy didn’t know where he’d gone. That was quite funny. Then Bolasie got it and did some amazing things. We also had Jonny Williams there, so what I tried to do was encourage that and give them some things that I’d heard that Gianfranco Zola used to do in practice. He would take on three people from the semi-circle to the goal, one after another and I managed to get them to take each other on after training, make it a challenge. What you don’t want to do is quash that wonderful sort of free style. Wilf had a style about him that was pretty unique, and him and Yannick would try and outdo each other. Little Jonny Williams wanted to be like them anyway, so it worked out a treat. I was totally shocked and in awe of what they both could do because it’s totally unique and I don’t think there was any other club at that time that had two such great individuals. They probably didn’t know what they were going to do, so that made it impossible for a defender to know. That was in our attacking style.”
Holloway joined the club in 2012, leading them to a Championship play-off final win over Watford after defeating rivals Brighton in the semi-finals. But Holloway admitted he was not quite ready for just how good Zaha was on the ball until he got settled at Selhurst Park. And he revealed that Chelsea legend Gianfranco Zola’s training method played a part in trying to get the best from Zaha and Bolasie during his time in charge.
