Oliver Glasner puffs his cheeks and starts the search for the right words to explain his emotions as he prepares to return to Crystal Palace for the first time since leaving. There is the small matter of heading back on Sunday with Nottingham Forest to Selhurst Park, where bitterness runs deep over the club seizing Palace’s place in the Europa League last season. Forest’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, is suing Palace for defamation relating to a banner unfurled by their supporters and the rivalry heightened when Glasner joined Forest in the summer, 40 days after winning the Conference League with Palace.
“I know I will be, but I don’t want to be in the middle of all the comments and the stories about this game,” he says in the boardroom at Forest’s training base. By which point Glasner, a charismatic and intelligent individual who studied for an economics degree while a player in Austria, has turned to Faust, by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to explain how he feels about facing his previous club. “Two hearts are beating in my chest,” he says, tapping his torso, alluding to a line in the classic play. “Here is a little bit similar, because we had a little bit more than two great years [at Palace].”
