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By Ian King
The Eagles have managed just three goals in six games and go into their Saturday lunchtime match against Liverpool in the relegation places; not the sort of return that many expected after the team was talked up a lot during the pre-season.
Last weekend Palace were on Merseyside, to little effect. Indeed, losing 2-1 to Everton after having taken a first half lead has only raised questions over whether this slump is more than a mirage, and whether an unexpected fight against relegation could be on the horizon this season. Certainly a home match against the league leaders is the match they’d probably want least of all to follow such a dismal result.
Optimists would argue that six League matches isn’t a lot to base such a grim prognosis upon, but pessimists might well counter that they are now 15% of the way through the season, and that things don’t seem to have improved from their opening day defeat at Brentford. If things are going to drastically improve, then this improvement needs to start soon.
But while Palace’s start to the season can hardly be categorised as a great success, is there a need for catastrophism this early in the season? After all, while Palace haven’t won in the League they’ve hardly been outplayed, either. They went into the Everton match off the back of three straight draws, results which indicated how close they might be to actually turning a corner, while they haven’t conceded more than two goals in a match, with two of their three losses coming by the odd goal. They’re still in the Carabao Cup following wins against Norwich City and Queens Park Rangers. So what’s the problem?
Well, it may be a matter of over-inflated expectations over the summer break. Palace ended last season with a spectacular run of seven wins and a draw from their last eight games, including wins against Liverpool, Newcastle United and Manchester United, and scoring five goals against West Ham United and Aston Villa. This, it was widely-predicted, could be the precursor to a push towards the Premier League’s European places for a club which previously hadn’t finished above 10th place in the table in the eleven years since their return to the division.
Oliver Glasner had only taken over the team from Roy Hodgson in February, and it is occasionally forgotten that, following a 3-0 win against Burnley in his opening match, he then went on a run of five games without a win which included taking just two points from matches against Luton Town, Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth. In other words, rather than the narrative of Glasner sweeping out the cobwebs left behind by the previous manager which has bedded in since that run at the end of last season, could it be that one of the key characteristics of his Palace team will turn out to be that they’re a little streaky?
It’s certainly tempting to wonder about the extent to which the summer speculation concerning so many of their players might have had an unsettling effect on some of them. They lost a couple of important players during the window – Michael Olise to Bayern Munich and Joachim Andersen to Fulham – but there were also a lot of other rumours concerning other players floating about, and even though none of them actually left, it’s not difficult to see how such a state of affairs could end up unsettling a lot of people around the club.
And the media may also be a little to blame, here. Pre-season, hopes for this time around for Palace had been high, which seemed entirely fuelled by that late run at the end of last season and without apparently taking into account much of their summer transfer activity. To what extent that has played into their tepid start to the season is unquantifiable, but it’s surely greater than zero. It also seems possible that speculation over the future of part-owner John Textor may have had an unsettling effect as well.
All of which brings us back to that question of, to what extent is this form a blip? Or to what extent might there be something more serious going on behind the scenes? Palace certainly need to get a couple of wins in before December.
When that month comes around, they meet Manchester City, rivals Brighton, and Arsenal in successive weeks. Beating Liverpool might be a tall order, but with another international break coming up after this weekend’s match, that break is now taking on extra significance as an opportunity for a reset.
Palace need this, if their early season isn’t to turn into a fight to stay in the Premier League.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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