Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish has told talkSPORT Alan Pardew’s position as manager is ‘totally safe’, insisting he has the whole backing of the club.

Palace have a woeful record in the Premier League in 2016 and there has been intense speculation over Pardew’s future in recent weeks.

But after the Eagles arrested a run of six straight defeats with victory over Southampton on Saturday, Parish launched a passionate defence of Pardew.

He claimed the 55-year-old has been nothing but a ‘positive force’ around Selhurst Park since his arrival in January 2015 and insisted he retains the trust and faith of the club’s American co-owners David Blitzer and Josh Harris.

Asked about Pardew’s position as Palace manager by Jim White on talkSPORT, Parish responded. “It is totally safe in that every manager is under pressure.

“You need to win football matches. It is a very binary industry and we are all under pressure. You can’t lift that pressure from people – that is no more constructive than putting it on them.

“We don’t have to have that conversation because Alan knows the game, he knows where he is and he knows the things he has to do. The most important thing is we want him to succeed, we try and help him to succeed, and all the things around the club are geared to making him succeed.

“He is a positive force in everything around the football club, in the interest he takes in every area of the football club, and all the positive things he does, so everybody is geared to making Alan a success at the club.

“If you look at the league this season, the top teams have gone to another level. They are taking points off everybody. It is very, very flat at the bottom. If you look around us, if we are in crisis then there are a lot of clubs in crisis.

“I think Alan has got a 41 per cent win record at Palace, which is pretty astonishing actually managng in the Premier League at our standard of club.

“We have got to find the right balance on the pitch really with the squad that we have got and that is what we are trying to do. Sometimes if you turn the dial a bit too far and try to go toe-to-toe with some of these teams you can make it difficult for yourself, albeit very exciting.

“We are scoring a lot of goals – we have scored 24 goals which is the most we have ever scored at this stage in the top flight in our history – so there is plenty right.

“We have just got to fix the things that are wrong and I think you saw the start of that at the weekend. We were much more solid, a lot more difficult to break down, we got a clean sheet, so hopefully we can carry that on.

Pardew publicly thanked Parish for his recent support after the win over Southampton but appeared to aim a dig at Blitzer and Harris, saying : “We have a lot of serious investors at the club who perhaps don’t know a lot about football.”

Parish, however, has brushed off the comments, insisting Pardew was not referring to the American businessmen and has a good relationship with both.

“Josh, David and I are very close,” he insisted.

“Alan speaks to them regularly as well – we have just been to America – so we all knew where we were. We cut out the noise in the background of the media which you have to do and try and stay on track with what we are trying to do.

“We have got some smaller shareholders and we went out to a dinner with them the week before and lot of them kept saying to Alan that they don’t know a lot about football. It wasn’t the smartest lack of differential between Josh and David, who he deals with all the time and I deal with all the time.

“Some of the other guys openly said they don’t know a lot about football. I think his main intention was to thank me, thank Josh and thank David for the support he had.

“It was unfortunate it got a little bit twisted out of shape but there is no real story there.”