Fans of the Crystal Palace soccer club reportedly vandalized their own team’s bus by mistake Saturday, not long before the club scored an important victory on the field.
Coming upon the bus, which was parked in a hotel lot near Crystal Palace’s home stadium in south London, hooligans apparently assumed the coach belonged to Middlesbrough, which was in town for a match important to relegation. Why would the home team bring a bus to the home stadium, right? Well, wrong. Home teams do that frequently.
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Crystal Palace won 1-0 to lift itself out of the relegation zone. After the game, the team arrived at their bus only to find it pimped out, with “CRYSTAL PALACE FC” spray-painted in red, white, and blue across the sides and rear. The team used the bus anyway, as it was not damaged in any other way. After all, “Crystal Palace” is their name, don’t wear it out.
The Telegraph reported that CP’s assistant head groundsman Dean Waters noted the vandalism in a Twitter post:
“£40,000 worth of damage on our coach thinking it was the Boro coach. Nice one! #cpfc,” Waters tweeted, before changing his privacy settings so that the post was no longer available for the public to read.
That’s about $50,000 in U.S. money. Just for fun, Crystal Palace should submit a bill to Middlesbrough. Or, even better, the Premier League should make this an annual part of relegation, that the losing teams must also use vandalized buses.
