“I know he did speak to other players individually. What they did with him one to one I don’t know. I never got through the door to speak with him, one to one.
“He said to me: ‘You need me to motivate you in games.’ I went: ‘If I needed you to motivate me in games, I’d pack up.’ I wasn’t trying to be nasty or nothing but I felt if I don’t motivate myself to play a game of football for Palace’s first-team then I shouldn’t be in this football club or anywhere near football.
“We had a bit of banter with him and he did things with us a group. I can remember him going on the pitch and getting the crowd going. He’d run up onto the pitch, went out on the pitch with an umbrella and a microphone and started talking to the crowd: trying to get them up for the game.
“He had a lead from his microphone that went into the tunnel and as you do in those days, you take the plug out, don’t you? He’s talking in front of 20-odd thousand at Selhurst and the crowd are absolutely caning him because he thought they could hear what he was saying and we had taken the microphone plug out!”
Disappointingly, then, Hinshelwood suggests, Romark was little but an early day sport psychologist with a penchant from drumming out positive mantras.
Clearly though, Allison’s psychic support fancied himself as something of a ‘70s Uri Geller and when the Palace manager fell into a dispute with him over wage payments, he decided to wield his mystical powers in an act of revenge.