The Fear

Going by the Frank De Boer experience, Roy Hodgson has three more games to save his job. Given that they are against Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea, the former England manager might want to start preparing his cardboard box to take away his belongings from his office already.

If Palace were hoping for a new manager bounce – although after the experiences of De Boer and even Sam Allardyce before him I’m not sure that’s a thing anymore – it took all of six minutes for that to fall very flat. It was all depressingly familiar; start a game on the back foot, have men sitting deep behind the ball but no-one close to an opposition player, a fullback allowing a cross to come in largely unchallenged and a customary ‘not quite a howler’ but poor piece of goalkeeping. 1-0 down at home early to a team previously struggling and who didn’t appear that good either – if you were playing Palace bingo you would have had a full house.

There’s been plenty written over the past week or so about the club and their decision to sack Frank De Boer after just four winless, pointless and goalless games, indeed for the past couple of weeks it’s felt like we were the biggest team in the country given the amount of column inches and opinions devoted to Palace from sources that scarcely acknowledge they exist most of the time. The one thing that’s actually perversely humorous about the whole situation, is that Palace being so ineptly bad has got the whole football world talking about them diverting attention away from the ‘feel good’ story of Brighton being back in the top flight for 30+ years. Every cloud and all that.

Whether it was the right decision to get rid of De Boer or not is something that will run and run, but the general consensus after some of the dust and debris had settled after the Dutchman’s sacking was that Hodgson was a good appointment; a stable presence, a man with a good track record at clubs of similar stature and a man with a local connection to the London Borough of Croydon. Sure it wasn’t the long term future and evolution the club is seemingly after, despite the managerial departure lounge suggesting this is a laughable ideal, but this was a step in the right direction to the club achieving it’s short term aim of staying in the Premier League. Unfortunately the players didn’t seem to get that memo.

One of the most depressing aspects of Saturday’s performance against Southampton was how much worse, and how much more disjointed it was than the one that preceded it at Turf Moor under a manager that was effectively dead man walking at that stage. The defeat to Burnley was a genuine hard luck story; Palace creating enough chances to win a couple of games and the opposition manager saying they had been much the better side. If the hope was that the team would carry on that level of performance into an eminently winnable game at home to a goal shy Southampton then this was horribly dashed. For large parts of Saturday’s game, I genuinely thought Palace were dreadful – devoid of a coherent game plan and lacking in any belief. It was painful to watch, seeing players gripped by fear and bemused at what to do to make things better.

It’s hard to know where to start with what was going wrong on the pitch, which was summed up by the first half performance down Palace’s left hand side. Jeffrey Schlupp, playing at left back, and Jason Puncheon, playing at, well, I’ve got no idea where he was meant to be playing, spent the first half pointing vaguely at Southampton’s right sided players with neither knowing who should be picking up which man. The result was neither of them picking up anyone. Time and again there was a gap an ocean liner could have got through down that flank and it’s unsurprising that’s where the Saints goal originated from. Whether this is the fault of the manager (any of them), pre-match strategy or individual ineptitude, I’m not quite sure.

On the other side of the defence, Joel Ward, a player that has been a consistent performer during his time at the club and a regular back to the team’s promotion winning season is someone desperately needing a break from the first team. To be somewhat self indulgent and quote myself, I wrote this back at the beginning of the year; “At right back, I believe Joel Ward is a good player, who has played almost every game for five seasons now, but the lack of competition and being forced to play out of position to fill the gaping hole on the left side of defence has taken its toll. If ever there was a player that would benefit from being taken out of the firing line for a few games, it’s Ward, but there are no other options to have allowed this to happen.”

Those words are even truer today.

After Saturday’s game, Daniel Storey on Football 365 wrote of a Palace ‘disease’ and a ‘fear’ amongst the players that have been there over the past several seasons. I definitely think there is something to that.

As Storey writes: ‘For all the merited censure of De Boer and Palace’s inability or unwillingness to match grand ideas with processes, this is a group of players that has been under-performing for far too long. Short passes are misplaced, wingers are left unmarked and shots are snatched.

This was not a De Boer problem, and nor is it a Hodgson problem; it is a Crystal Palace disease. Fifty-four points from their last 64 league matches under four different managers. Confidence has not just been pierced, it has deflated and dried out.

Evidence for that is found in the performance of individual players. With Wilfried Zaha injured, Palace’s two brightest players this season are Loftus-Cheek and Timothy Fosu-Mensah, with the latter their star turn against Southampton. Loftus-Cheek drove from midfield with the ball, and was unfortunate not to equalise with a low drive. The contrast with Benteke, Townsend and Jason Puncheon was embarrassing.

While Christian Benteke struggles for goals, Yohan Cabaye struggles for rhythm and five or six other established first-teamers just struggle, it is no coincidence that the two newest arrivals are the ones most able to play with something approaching freedom. They are yet to be suffocated by The Fear; it may choke them in the end.’

It’s worryingly familiar to something else I wrote last season before Sam Allardyce had managed to galvanise the team to get the impressive and unlikely results that kept them up last season:

“All over the pitch, Palace are a team whose confidence has been shot to pieces. Losing every week for a year will do that for you. It’s what’s happened at Sunderland and what happened at Villa. Is it going too far to say that this group of players are broken? Watching them this season, a goal against them often leads to dejection, and in the recent West Ham game, capitulation. It’s not a case that the team hasn’t been trying, or doesn’t care; I really don’t believe that; the crazy games at Burnley, Swansea and Hull at the end of Alan Pardew’s time show that. In every game, the team were constantly fighting to get back into games, only to throw them all away with woeful defending and brain freezing moments. But even that spirit seems to have been eroded now, leaving a team that has talent but no belief in their ability to use it.”

Palace are in their fifth consecutive season in the top flight, a run that is the most successful in their history, and yet the fantastic wins of just a few months ago at Anfield and Stamford Bridge and against Arsenal at Selhurst Park already seem a life time ago. That is Palace’s Premier League adventure summed up; boom and bust with increasingly short cycles. Out of their depth under Holloway, fantastic under Pulis. Lost under Warnock, everything clicking under Pardew. A confidence shattering year under Pardew, salvation under Allardyce. If you looked at the cycle, you probably could’ve predicted the bust at the beginning of the season, but as the global financial meltdown of the last few years has shown, just presuming another boom is around the corner is a dangerous game to play.

This season, Palace have managed the impressive feat of being the least coherent team in each game they’ve played, while the game away at Liverpool apart, been the team that’s created the most chances. On expected goals and looking at a Premier League table if every team had got the points they ‘deserve’ given the chances they have created and conceded, Palace would actually be 8^th. Is the lack of luck the side has had in front of goal simple misfortune, or another ill-effect of the chronic lack of belief, ‘the fear’ that Storey talks about?

It’s also a result of the haphazard recruitment over the past several transfer windows that resulted in a bench on Saturday without a striker on it. That’s because, outside of a misfiring Christian Benteke and the long term injured Connor Wickham, there are no senior strikers in the squad. While on paper the talent in the side as of right now far eclipses the honest tryers and odd bargain buys that Ian Holloway came up with in 2013, there is still a distinct whiff of the Championship to the players in the squad outside the first eleven required to come into the side as a result of injuries or to put pressure on underperformers.

It’s why the team could quite realistically be on zero points from eight games this season, but bizarrely, even if that comes to pass, and despite everything I’ve just written above, I don’t think that would mean relegation is nailed on. A few people have highlighted that on their first season back in the top flight under Ian Holloway, the club only had three points from their first ten games and still managed to stay up comfortably. Even with Palace’s general lack of cohesion in the games they’ve played this season, other than Huddersfield – against whom Palace created several great chances and whose keeper was voted MOM – I’ve been distinctly unimpressed with the standard of the other teams. There are plenty of points to play for, and when Hodgson has been able to implement his ideology and vision onto the team then most pundits seem to think their will be an upturn in performances, and hopefully some long overdue good fortune. The worry remains however, at how far this can counteract the weaknesses and imbalances in a disjointed squad and whether the players are brave enough to overcome The Fear.