For three glorious minutes, Jason Puncheon allowed himself to dream of winning the FA Cup for his club, the team he grew up supporting and whose ground was a stone’s throw from his home.
His sumptuous volley thumped beyond David de Gea and into the back of the Manchester United net had put Crystal Palace ahead 78 minutes into the 2016 final. The finishing line was within sight. Then Juan Mata’s equaliser and Jesse Lingard’s extra-time winner turned euphoria into despair, dreams into dust.
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Nine years on from that day and Puncheon, now a manager in the Cypriot league, still remains synonymous with the FA Cup for Palace fans. His attention will be drawn away from preparations for life in Cypriot First Division by Wembley again and Saturday’s 2025 final, where Palace confront Manchester City. The Eagles will be trying, once again, to claim their first major trophy.
“If those players win it they should build statues of them outside the stadium,” Puncheon tells The Athletic of those who succeeded him at Selhurst Park. “Palace can beat City. I really hope they do; that the team take it home for us and make south London proud. I would love them to win the FA Cup. It’s my hometown club. I’m still in contact with a lot of people there.”
The 38-year-old is hoping for a double celebration.
As head coach of Akritas Chlorakas, he guided his team out of the Second Division and into the top flight after taking charge in the early stages of the season, winning 10 of their final 15 matches. Rather than basking in that glory, though, it has been straight back to work.
“It was always a target of mine to get promoted, going into Akritas,” says Puncheon. “It’s ready to go to the First Division. As a manager, when you get promoted you know that now you need to build again. Those first two days, you’re over the moon. But then you have to get ready for next season.
“When I joined we were eight points off the top in eighth place and I said: ‘I want to win the league.’ That’s my mentality. I never told the committee that. I told them I wanted to get promoted. But to the players, I said I wanted to win the league to drive that mentality. The club at first was not sure if we could get promoted. It was only towards the last two months of the season that people really started to believe it.
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“We can establish ourselves in the First Division. It becomes like almost two divisions. You’ve got the top clubs who have budgets between €7-15million (£5.9-12.6m; $7.8-16.7m), and then you’ve got clubs with up to €1m budgets. It’s all about what you build, and I believe you can build something good with the right recruitment process.
“I’d be very confident (of avoiding relegation), but what it took to get promoted in this league is completely different to what it will take to stay in the top division. It will take hard work, a fit team, a good team tactically and a strong mentality.”
Puncheon wearing his No 42 Palace shirt (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
It has been a whirlwind journey to this point for Puncheon, with ample opportunity for learning since he retired from playing in the summer of 2023. Akritas is his fourth coaching job.
His first, with Second Division Peyia 2014, lasted six months that saw eight wins from 18 games. He was dismissed from his second job after just seven games at top-flight side AEZ Zakakiou in March 2024 after failing to win a game, before he chose to leave Ayia Napa for Akritas last November after only two games in charge.
Now he seems to be settled. It is, he says, “a good match”.
“Two of the jobs were stable. It was disappointing to leave Peyia in the January, but financial issues changed the dynamic of the club. We built a team there, but new owners came in and started to go in a different direction. We lost six or seven players and couldn’t bring any more in.
“I wanted to see the season out. It was too soon to go to a First Division team in the circumstances and AEZ were second-bottom.
“The first two jobs were two completely opposite. The Peyia job was like: ‘Look, we’re going to fight to try to go in the top six.’ I said: ‘No, I want to fight for promotion.’ The AEZ job was trying to keep a team in a division that was already going down.
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“Where I was at in my career, it wasn’t good for me to take that risk. You know it’s a backward step. I turned down a lot of things in the summer. I was probably a bit disheartened and disappointed at the early stage of my career.
“Ayia Napa is a fantastic club; they just need to get the dynamics correct and they can be a First Division team, but I knew there was a mist of the Akritas interest in the background.
“I knew Akritas was the right job to take. We have the support of the president, the club, the committee, and it’s a good place. They paid for me to get out (Ayia Napa) and I knew they had the ability to get promoted. It had a good squad.”
Stability is important to Puncheon. His career had been a flurry of loan moves, a nomadic existence that eventually saw him swap Southampton for a homecoming with Palace. It was there he enjoyed six seasons as a player and helped an unfancied team retain their top-flight status in his first few years, then establish themselves at that level.
The Wembley goal was the high point.
He had not been picked to start that day by manager Alan Pardew but, six minutes after replacing Yohan Cabaye in the 72nd minute, he thumped that ferocious shot beyond De Gea.
Puncheon celebrates putting Palace ahead at Wembley in 2016 (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
“The ball bounced up off my first touch, and I just thought: ‘Hit it as hard as you can at the target.’ I didn’t have a clue where it went… not until I saw the net bulging and everyone going crazy behind the goal,” was his recollection of the goal when speaking with The Athletic in 2020.
Five years on, those memories are more distant. Perhaps those three minutes before Mata’s equaliser had been so deliriously euphoric that processing everything has been too challenging.
“When I played my first Premier League game and the first time I played at Anfield, for example, I had goosebumps,” he says. “But I didn’t have that at Wembley. I don’t know if it was because I was not playing or what, I didn’t have that, at all. When I was on the bench I was watching the game, taking in the atmosphere.
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“I didn’t feel, like, goosebumps… none of that. It was only when I went on the pitch and got into the game that I thought: ‘Wow.’ I scored and it was, like: ‘Where am I?’
“When I went in the game it was like being in an oven. I didn’t even recognise that there were fans outside, as an example. You can just hear noise, but you don’t recognise it. It was almost like an oven inside the game. That’s what it felt like.
“But the game goes on and it’s one of those things that will always live with me. I scored but we lost.”
A distraught Puncheon collects his runners-up medal (Michael Regan – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
He had consoled an upset Wilfried Zaha before kick off at the national stadium, leading many watching on from the stands to conclude, incorrectly, that Zaha had been omitted from the starting lineup. But Puncheon says it was not out of the ordinary for them to speak.
“I could see Wilf was thinking about it before the game, he was a little bit worried. Wilf and Yannick Bolasie were like my little brothers. I looked after them, tried to help them and I always spoke to Wilf before a game.”
That ability to act effectively as a mentor, to help nurture talent, has been taken into his managerial career.
“My dream as a coach here is to progress the Cyprus players into the national team and to get them into big teams outside Cyprus,” he says.
“I like pressure. Some coaches learn with the under-21s, which I don’t think is a bad route. But, here, I have the pressure of having to win. Pressure drives me, it always made me want to play football.
“Everything falls on your shoulders as a manager, it’s completely different. You can sit and talk to a stranger who has never watched a football match in their life, and they’ll come up with something that makes you think differently. That’s the beauty of the game. You are always learning.
“I want to build on what I’ve done here (with Akritas). They’ve been fantastic to me. I want to build on it and we’ll see what happens after that.”
Puncheon bids farewell to Palace in 2019 (Christopher Lee/Getty Images)
He will allow himself a moment to escape from planning for next season to focus on the FA Cup final as a fan, desperately hoping Palace can go one step further than the class of 2016. To that end, he offers words for the 2025 group to consider.
“The dynamic was similar with the players we had,” he adds. “We had Zaha, Bolasie and Connor Wickham, but this team has better technical players across the board. If they could mix the mentality we had — and I’m not saying they don’t have the mentality — with that technical ability, the world’s their oyster.
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“You have one chance to make the difference and to be part of history at a football club. Manchester City, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal… they want to win more trophies, the targets are different.
“Fans can forget those players who won an FA Cup for them because they’ve won it so many times, or they’ve won so many cups. They forget that player unless he had a legacy at the club, a sustained period in the team.
“But those Palace players, if they win that cup… people would still remember them in 50 years.”
(Top photo: Ben Hoskins – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
