For more than a decade Scott Guyett was Crystal Palace’s head of sports science – now he lifts the lid on a club preparing for an FA Cup semifinal with Chelsea early on Monday. Tom Smithies reports
It’s a warm summer’s day at St Georges Park, the home of English football. Amid the 14 outdoor pitches, sports sciences labs and the five-star hotel strwen across the sprawling site, Premier League side Crystal Palace are powering through the rigours of a pre-season camp.
Watching everything is Patrick Vieira, the former Arsenal midfielder who is days into his first appointment as a head coach in the English Premier League and working at speed to meld a squad with a raft of new faces.
Watching with essentially a front row seat is an Australian who as quietly clocked up a decade of service to Palace as the club’s head of sports science and conditioning, working to support managers ranging from Neil Warnock and Sam Allardyce to Roy Hodgson and Alan Pardew.
One thing struck Scott Guyett immediately about Vieira the manager who as a player had won the World Cup, the European Championship and the Premier League.
“He never ever spoke about himself, never, you know, referred back to his playing career, or anything like that,” recalls Guyett. “But straight away, you know, he had an aura about him, Patrick. I remember first seeing it in preseason camp when we went to St. George’s Park.
“You could just see that he was he was made for management really, the way he carried himself. I still speak to the some of the players and the staff now and they will speak so highly of him.”
Guyett is speaking in the past tense because two months into Vieira’s tenure he took the difficult decision to leave the club and accept an offer to become assistant coach at Brisbane Roar, bringing his young family home last September in order to grow up where he did.
But Guyett, who last year was presented with the Chairman’s award at Palace for his service to the club, has watched with pride as Palace have not only more than held their own in the Premier League, but fought their way to an FA Cup semifinal with Chelsea at Wembley early on Monday morning (AEST).
Vieira’s overhaul
“It’s no surprise to me that they’ve had such a good season,” Guyett says. “They’ve done really well with recruitment. Under Roy (Hodgson) we had a very aging squad, I think it was the oldest in the Premier League by some distance. A lot of the boys had been there for a long time. I think the players needed the new challenge and I think the club needed to see some new faces.
“The top performers this season, most of them are from that group of players that they brought in so I think it’s been really well managed by the football club as a whole you know, not just from a team perspective.
“It’s a huge achievement in your first year in in a new management job in the Premier League to get the club to the semi final, a wonderful achievement. We were there in 2016 and in the early rounds of the FA Cup, it almost seems like a bit of a distraction – at Crystal Palace, it was always our goal to stay in the Premier League. That was the big goal.
“The FA Cup early rounds would come along and you’d get through a game and then you get through the next one, and you get through the next one. And before you know it, you’re at a quarterfinal. I remember, I think we played Reading in the quarterfinal on a Friday night and it’s only really at that point that you realize that wow, we could be heading to an FA Cup semi final here.
“For me, (reaching the FA Cup final in 2016) was probably the greatest day in my professional career. I grew up in Australia where the FA Cup was probably the only live game you got to see.
“I’ve very early memories of the 1983 FA Cup Final against Brighton and Hove Albion, that was my first proper memory of Manchester United. So to actually go to an FA Cup Final against Manchester United was just an incredible moment for me.”
Zaha’s journey
Wilfried Zaha will be crucial to Palace’s hopes of shocking Chelsea and Guyett has been heavily involved in the striker’s career since he came through Palace’s youth system and made such an impression that he was signed by Manchester United – but returned to Palace after struggling at Old Trafford.
“What I saw with Wilf when I first joined the club was a young player that just played with absolute freedom and had no other pressures outside – I wouldn’t say was a street footballer, but he was just a lad that just loved football so much,” Guyett says.
“The same tricks he was doing in the park on a Saturday afternoon with his mates, he was doing on a Sunday afternoon in the Championship against good quality opposition. But over time, as Wilf became the best player at Crystal Palace, there were additional pressures. I saw it over the years, he became, you know, the face of Crystal Palace.
“Whenever you spoke about Crystal Palace, it was always about Wilfried, whenever he was injured, it was always a big deal. People said we didn’t win many games when Wilfred didn’t play. I could sense sometimes when he was perhaps a little bit stressed and a little bit worked up. That goes back to the trust and the relationship that you build with the players.
“Wilf pretty much had the weight of the club on his shoulders at times, you know, particularly in those difficult periods when we were struggling, it would always be, ‘Oh turn to Wilfried to do his magic’.
“I must say that it’s tough, particularly at Premier League level. You’re plastered all over social media 24/7, anything you do now, just doesn’t go unnoticed. We saw the thing with Cristiano Ronaldo, a minor (incident, knocking a fan’s phone to the ground) and then it’s front page of the newspapers and all over social media. For players there’s a lot of psychological stress, probably not enough attention is paid to that.”
Jedinak’s pulling power
Guyett paid tribute to the influence of former Socceroos captain Mile Jeinak when he played at Palace, crediting him with changing the dressing room culture.
“When Mile first came in, he bought a sense of professionalism to the football club in everything he did – what he ate, going into the gym before training, going into the gym after training, how he recovered.
“It sort of pulled everyone along, pulled all the young players. Then a few of the older players jumped on with Mile and before you know it, you’ve got three or four young lads doing it. And then once you’ve got that, then you know that you’re onto something good.
“Mile was a man mountain when he was at Crystal Palace, both on and off the pitch. I think that’s why he did particularly well physically, he was very strong.
“Mile used to go away for international duty, get on a flight Saturday night and fly all the way back to Australia for a game. Then he would come back and play the following Saturday or Sunday, very rarely missed the game on the back of international duty. He loved playing for his country, was really proud to wear the captain’s armband there but it never affected his club career which is a testament to how he lived and what he did.”
