Should Tony Pulis win the Premier League manager of the year for the amazing turnaround of fortunes of Crystal Palace?

Three amazing results in 10 days have all but secured the Eagles’ top flight status for next season; the first time they have ever been promoted to the Premier League and stayed there. Although mathematically the club isn’t 100 percent safe yet but the chances of going down this season are very little. All the credit goes to one and only one man and he is Tony Pulis.
It was quite a shift in philosophies from Ian Holloway, who seemed fairly unconcerned with minor details like defence, preferring to concentrate on gung-ho attacking play. The problem was that Holloway’s tactics were not working. Palace very nearly threw away promotion under his leadership last season in the Championship, conducted a muddled summer transfer window that was so poorly planned that one signing, Florian Marange, was not even included in their 25-man squad, and gained only three points in the eight games he was at the helm this season. Holloway recognised this, but he left his successor a team in the relegation zone and a horribly imbalanced squad, something that initially seemed to put Pulis off taking the job.
Pundits talk constantly about how tough and unrelenting the Premier League is, but when you have the least expensive squad in the division and manage to make them one of the most in-form teams that is surely more impressive than spending millions on an already very good team to take them to the title, in a season where Manchester United are rubbish and Arsenal have lots of injuries.
Since Tony’s arrival at Selhurst Park, the job he has done has been just short of miraculous, taking Palace from virtual relegation certainties to the brink of survival. Pulis has been in charge for 21 games, in which Palace have gained 30 points, which if extrapolated over a full season would put them in eighth place, just below Manchester United and above the Southampton side that has attracted so much praise this season.
Pulis has simply organised the players already at his disposal in a much more efficient way, and his team have kept eight clean sheets and conceded just 20 goals during his time at the helm. So impressive has Pulis been that Jose Mourinho, not usually a man to dish out lavish praise for anyone but himself, suggested that the Welshman’s achievements should be recognised at the end of the season.
While Brendan Rodgers has performed brilliantly at Anfield and Mauricio Pochettino’s Southampton are one of the stories of the season, Pulis’s achievement is arguably greater because he was given a team heading nowhere, a third of the way into the season, and has completely turned it around.
For a start, next season will be very, very difficult for Crystal Palace & especially Tony Pulis. Not just because of added expectations now the team has managed to stay in the Premier League, but the quality of team coming up from the Championship is way better than the dross down the bottom of the top flight at the moment.