“Oh Danny, Danny...Danny, Danny, Danny, Danny Butterfield!”

Blogs by their very nature are somewhat self-indulgent; however today please allow me to enjoy indulging in what was quite the remarkable triumph last night

If you're a Crystal Palace fan (and heaven help you if you are) then the last couple of weeks haven't exactly been the easiest. Players not being paid, £30 million debts, star players being sold, ten point deductions and administration; all that in the space of seven bleak days. At some point I intend to post something more detailed to try and make some sort of sense of everything going on (which isn’t going to be easy, believe me) but for now, I’d quite like to revel in a brief oasis of light in what has rapidly become a very dark desert.

Before Tuesday night’s FA Cup replay against Wolves, Danny Butterfield had only scored seven goals in his 252 appearances for the club. A committed, hard working, and actually much underrated full back, Palace’s current longest serving player can now boast statistics of 10 in 253.

A wafer thin squad, comprising largely of talented, yet inexperienced youngsters and complimented by a smattering of grizzled lower league veterans has in recent weeks been even more stretched, prompting the defender to be pushed forward into an unfamiliar attacking right wing role. Against Newcastle he missed a virtual open goal. Against Peterborough at the weekend he was deservedly man of the match yet still contrived to pass up two fantastic scoring opportunities. Come Tuesday’s cup tie, he was therefore an unlikely goal scoring hero.

Right foot, left foot and a header – the perfect hat-trick. As the man himself said; "I've done this a day too late, I could have gone for £4m or £5m on Monday." Maybe, although what’s probably more likely is that a Premiership club would have offered a tenner and claimed they were doing the club a favour.

Before we all get carried away (I know, I know), let’s be honest with ourselves, this one result, whilst a nice boost (and a nice little earner) is merely a papering over of some giant, gaping, cavernous cracks. Getting through to the 5th round of the FA Cup pales into insignificance when looking at the wider issues at stake; the fact the very existence of the club itself hangs firmly in the balance.

The money earned from winning through, the potential money to be earned from a televised game in the next round against Aston Villa, and even the £4 million earned in player sales these last couple of weeks is all really a drop in the ocean when one considers the enormous black hole of debt that threatens to engulf the club and suck it in.

However for one night, let’s try to forget all that and celebrate the positives. Let’s celebrate a club from the Championship dominating one from the Premiership all over the pitch for an entire 90 minutes, let’s celebrate there still being a little ‘magic’ left in the FA Cup and most of all let’s celebrate the achievements of one Mr. Daniel Paul Butterfield, and let him enjoy his moment in the sun.