As they prepare to face West Ham on Saturday, players and staff alike at Crystal Palace may reflect on their previous match before the international break and contemplate what might have been had Damien Delaney arched his back a little more. Leicester City were leading 1-0 at Selhurst Park and as the contest moved into second-half injury time, Scott Dann nodded a corner back across the area and towards his centre-back partner who, in a moment of uncharacteristic composure in front of goal, steadied the ball on his chest before volleying it through a crowd of defenders. Delaney thought it was in, as did the majority of those in attendance, only for the ball to crash off the bar.
The final whistle blew shortly afterwards and Leicester had won for a seventh time in nine matches to keep alive the most incredible of Premier League title surges. For Palace it was a 13th league fixture without victory and while a goal from Delaney at the death would not have changed that, the home side undoubtedly would have got a boost from rescuing a point in such circumstances against the country’s leading team. As it is, they sit two places and seven points above the relegation zone and wondering when their slide will end.
Palace were fifth on New Year’s Eve, four points behind Tottenham in fourth and fuelling hope among their supporters of European football arriving at Selhurst Park next season. Since the turn of the year, however, there has not been a single league win to savour and talk in that corner of south-east London has turned from the Champions League to the Championship. Relegation remains an outside bet yet it simply cannot be ruled out given Palace’s form. An upturn is required.
It seems unlikely to come this weekend given that Palace’s opponents have lost only twice at Upton Park all season, sit one place and point off the top four and are generally playing with great conviction and quality. Alan Pardew’s men can take hope from their FA Cup run, with Palace reaching the semi-finals for the first time in 21 years after beating three Premier League teams – Southampton, Stoke and, most impressively, Spurs at White Hart Lane. Yet given none of those victories led to the same outcome in the league fixture that followed immediately afterwards there is no reason to believe they will have a positive effect on Palace now.
According to Opta, Palace have the third lowest shot-conversion rate in the Premier League since the turn of the year (9.18), the fourth lowest shooting accuracy rate (36.73%), completed the third fewest amount of passes (2,973), conceded the joint highest amount of goals (24) and kept the fewest clean sheets (zero). There has been a drop-off in every category since 1 January and while statistics do not tell you everything, they do tell you a lot. To put it bluntly, Palace have become worse in both boxes as well as the bit in the middle.
“The main question us Palace fans are asking each other is ‘why are the team doing so well in the FA Cup but struggling in the league?’” says Jim Daly, host of the Five Year Plan podcast. “Injuries haven’t helped – Yannick Bolasie, James McArthur, Jason Puncheon and Connor Wickham have all been out and missed badly and the back-ups just haven’t been good enough, even though at the start of the season we were debating whether this was our best ever squad. It still might be, but to kick on and be a serious top-10 team it needs to get better”.
Palace’s downturn has naturally drawn the spotlight on to Pardew. When the Eagles were soaring he was being spoken of as a future England manager; now they are struggling talk is focusing more on his reputation for overseeing dramatic slumps in form. At Newcastle there was a spell of 14 defeats in 20 matches during the second half of the 2013-14 season that ended their hopes of qualifying for Europe, while at Charlton a reasonable start to the 2008-09 campaign came to a halt with a run of eight games without victory that rooted them to the bottom of the Championship and cost Pardew his job.
Prior to that, he was sacked at West Ham after overseeing a run of 11 defeats in their first 17 fixtures of the 2006-07 season, the club’s worst string of results in more than 70 years and one that resulted in a team that had finished ninth and reached the FA Cup final the previous campaign suddenly fighting relegation.
Some call it “the Pardew slide” and the inference is that this is a manager who becomes lost at sea once his teams hit a rough patch, specifically in regard to his tactical solutions. That has been evident at Palace and certainly against Leicester when his response to seeing his team trailing at half-time was to launch as many crosses as possible into the opposition area. The approach appeared desperate, as well as reducing the ability of Bolasie and Wilfried Zaha to cause problems with their pace and trickery from wide areas and negating Yohan Cabaye’s craft and guile in central midfield. The Frenchman has not been at his best this season but remains a potent playmaker if used correctly.
The defeat also showed just how drained of confidence Palace’s players have become and that leads to questions regarding Pardew’s ability to lift them. There has been no verbal abuse of an opposition manager or physical assault of an opposition player but that shortest of fuses is undoubtedly still there, seen most clearly in the way Pardew reacted to Liverpool’s 2-1 win over Palace on 6 March and by the fact he dedicated a large portion of his programme notes for the visit of Claudio Ranieri’s men some 13 days later to the contentious penalty which earned the Merseyside club all three points. You could sense the fury dripping off the page.
The same programme notes also contained a rather bizarre take on Leicester’s success, with Pardew speaking of how the “stars have aligned” to send them top and that if Palace had suffered as few injuries and won as many penalties they too could be looking down from the summit. The entire passage smacked of hubris on the part of someone who, by his own admission, is not short of self-belief and took the mind back to the time when one former Premier League manager claimed a little bit of success makes Pardew “dangerous”.
In his defence, he is not the first manager to oversee slumps in form, lose his temper or give the impression that he never forgets to grin at a mirror before leaving the house, and it should not be forgotten that he took Palace from 17th to 10th having replaced Neil Warnock 14 months ago and, this season, has given the club real hope of reaching an FA Cup final for the first time since he scored that goal in the 1990 semi-final against Liverpool.
Not surprisingly, then, there is little suggestion of Pardew being in danger of losing his job, with Daly insisting it is only the “really negative fans” who want to see the back of their former midfielder. Yet the picture could change dramatically should the team’s slump deepen between now and facing Watford at Wembley on 24 April. In that time Palace also travel to Arsenal and Manchester United, as well as hosting Norwich and Everton. It is a daunting set of fixtures, with the visit of Alex Neil’s side on 9 April arguably the most crucial. A home defeat to a fellow struggler is simply unthinkable.
“The people who know these sorts of things reckon Palace have a 5% chance of going down, and that’s probably because there are four worse teams then them in the league,” says Daly. “But older fans will recall 1993 when the Eagles thought they were all but safe on the penultimate weekend of the season and so did a lap of honour around Selhurst Park. They went down a week later.”
