After a cagey start to the game from both sides, Bright struck after 37 minutes – Palace's first-ever Premier League goal. “It was a header at the far post,” he would later recall. “I think [Richard] Shaw came inside and crossed, and I just headed it down. Hand in the air, back to the halfway line and start again.”
The match ended in a 3-3 thriller as a young Alan Shearer struck a brace for the visitors, Simon Osborn answering for Palace at Selhurst in injury-time: a sign of the top-flight rollercoaster to come in SE25.
Goal #50: Gareth Southgate v Aston Villa
27th August 1994 (away)
Now revered across the country, Southgate started out as one of south London’s own; growing up in Crawley, he joined Palace’s youth setup after being released by Southampton as a schoolboy, and made his first-team breakthrough in the early 1990s under Steve Coppell.
Handed the captaincy in 1993/94 as Palace won promotion back to the Premier League, it is fitting, therefore, that Southgate struck the Eagles’ landmark 50th Premier League goal.
