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da jogodeouro： Crystal Palace’s slow and steady revival under Roy Hodgson last season created the perception of a club capable of so much more than simply battling it out to avoid relegation every year.
In fact, if you ignore the first seven games of last term in which the Eagles failed to score a goal or pick up a point and extrapolate their remaining return of 1.4 points per match across a 38-game season, they would have finished 2017/18 level with Burnley in seventh place.
But the new season has conjured up many of the old problems. It’s not been anywhere near as disastrous this time around, however the South Londoners have only managed seven points from eight games and scored the third-fewest goals of any side in the division.
Were it not for Cardiff, Newcastle and Huddersfield’s utterly pathetic starts, Palace could easily be within a defeat’s distance of the relegation zone and now due to face Everton, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham and Manchester United in their next five top flight games, the Eagles could well find themselves involved in the scrap for survival come the start of November.
The big problem has been hitting the net and while the obvious cause is the sheer profligacy of Hodgson’s strike options – Christian Benteke, Alexander Sorloth and Jordan Ayew – Palace are also falling victim to their own successes as well. Last season, because they were widely perceived as a relegation team, opponents naively gave Wilfried Zaha and Andros Townsend the kind of space on the counter-attack they were born to thrive in.
This year, teams are setting up a little deeper and a little more cautiously; suddenly, Palace’s greatest weapon – their sheer explosiveness on the break – has not only been blunted but made almost irrelevant.
That’s when you need technical playmakers to come to the fore, and the finger must be pointed at how the management and the board have failed to find the players to really evolve this Eagles side, to make it more than one-dimensional. Instead, Yohan Cabaye and Ruben Loftus-Cheek, players with the vision and flair to make something happen in front of a defence rather than the space behind it, left Selhurst Park.
Barring Max Meyer, who Hodgson for whatever reason doesn’t seem to completely trust, Palace are now absent of that orchestrating figure in midfield. Aside from another goalscorer, it’s surely where the club’s attentions will be focused in January.
Counter-intuitively though, the coming run of tough fixtures could be what truly explodes Palace’s troubled campaign into life. The absence of a No.10 type playmaker remains a long-term issue, but one that isn’t so gravely damaging against a higher calibre of team.
Because the likes of Chelsea and Arsenal will set their defences much higher up the pitch, Palace’s forward passes won’t require the same precision – they just need to reach Zaha and Townsend in the space they can eat up on the break – and there will be more room for the Eagles’ two wide attackers to burst into.
In fact, this Palace side is almost tailor-made for such occasions – facing superior teams who will naturally give them opportunities to counter-attack. It’s when Palace are given the ball by sides of similar or lesser ability, which has been the case this season at home particularly with their average possession jumping up from 48% last term to 53% this year, that they struggle to break the opposition down.
It’s certainly no coincidence then, that Hodgson kick-started Palace’s 2017/18 with a surprise win over reigning champions Chelsea, at almost exactly this time last year.
That’s not to say Palace will go on a winning run at the expense of some of the Premier League’s biggest clubs – last season, they only took four points in total off the top six. But there were plenty of promising showings against that calibre of opposition, losing to Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham by just the one goal, and because this side undoubtedly has the quality already to keep themselves clear of genuine relegation bother, a strong performance against a top side is probably as beneficial as results as this point in the season – a display that gives a much-needed confidence boost, even if it doesn’t add to Palace’s points tally.
The majority of Eagles fans will no doubt be fearing the worst, understandably considering how hyperbolic the Premier League has become and how quickly clubs can fall off their perch these days. But this could well be the very moment where their disappointing start to the season begins to turn around.
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