And with that, I’m going to take my leave. Thanks for your emails and your attention. Bye!
Some post-match player reaction from Sunderland players. Steven Fletcher:
It was a massive game for us. The performance, especially from the back four, was fantastic. We got away with one today [with the early penalty claim], I think everyone’s seen that. We know we’ve got a good squad, and we’ve shown tonight that we can put it on the pitch. It’s massive, especially going into next week, so with these three points we’ll have a good week in training.
And John O’Shea:
It was all about the victory. The front men that we had, they’re going to create chances, they’re going to score goals. Also the lads as a unit were a little bit more solid. The goal we conceded was disappointing, we’d switched off a bit from the set piece, but what a big three points for us. It just gives us that bit of momentum for us. After their goal Palace had five minutes when they were really on top, but then we got back into it again.
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But for the fact that they should have conceded a first-minute penalty, and could very well have been down to 10 men from then on, and thus would almost certainly have lost but for a very poor piece of refereeing, Sunderland deserved to win. From the 26th second onwards, this was their game. Palace had periods of dominance but in the end had no idea how to score except by getting the ball wide and crossing, the main problem with that being that their crossing was dreadful. Yannick Bolasie contributed nothing to this game, and Zaha only a little more. At home against a struggling side, this was a poor performance and a dreadful result.
Sunderland were OK. Steven Fletcher may have scored in only two games this season (braces on both occasions) but he remains an excellent scorer of goals, and they alone exhibited any particular craft in midfield. This was a quietly encouraging performance, and a vital result, for them.
Correction: Palace are 17th, ahead of Leicester on goals scored.
Final score: Crystal Palace 1-3 Sunderland
Sunderland go 15th, Palace go 18th, and the Black Cats’ Monday hoodoo is laid very much to rest.
1 - Sunderland have won a Premier League game on a Monday for the first time since April 1 2002. Patience.
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) November 3, 2014
GOAL! Crystal Palace 1-3 Sunderland (Fletcher, 90+5 mins)
The free-kick is hoisted forward onto a Palace head and falls for Puncheon, who turns straight into trouble. Bridcutt takes the ball off him, the Palace defence is caught entirely off guard, and he feeds Fletcher, who administers the coup de grace.
Updated
90+4 mins: Ninety short seconds of the game to go, and Sunderland have a free-kick in their own half. They are not hurrying about it.
90+2 mins: Palace win a corner, which Puncheon sends looping into Pantilimon’s catching zone. He, in turn, haplessly punts his clearance straight to Puncheon.
90+1 mins: Dann, incidentally, has donned the Palace armband in Jedinak’s absence.
90+1 mins: We’re into stoppage time now – and we’ll have five minutes of it. Five!
90 mins: This is all very niggly now, which is very convenient for Sunderland. The more stoppages the merrier, for them. Palace win a free-kick in their own half and lump it straight downfield into the hands of Pantilimon, which is also pretty convenient for Sunderland.
Red card! Jedinak is shown a second yellow, and he's off!
87 mins: Gomez is tripped and as he goes down collides with Jedinak, who is booked and thus sent off. It didn’t look like a booking to me, but actually – after both players are on the ground – he tries to kick Gomez, so can hardly quibble.
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85 mins: There’s a Sunderland player down here, and Bolasie wandering about guiltily. It’s Reveillere, who took a forearm in the face as Bolasie tried to keep him at arm’s length.
84 mins: Crystal Palace take off Hangeland and bring on Dwight Gayle. It’s getting close to final-roll-of-the-dice o’clock.
83 mins: This is excellent.
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82 mins: Another Sunderland switch, Liam Bridcutt coming on for Buckley.
81 mins: The problem is that, beyond giving the ball to Wes Brown and hoping for the best, Palace don’t seem to have any particular idea of how they might score. “I wonder what odds the bookies give before every Sunderland fixture on the double of a Clattermole booking and a Wes Brown own-goal?” ponders Lou Roper. “It should be reasonable.”
GOAL! Crystal Palace 1-2 Sunderland (Gomez, 79 mins)
Well, that was easy. Buckley cuts in from the right, basically unchallenged, and rolls the ball slowly across the edge of the area to Jordi Gomez, also unchallenged, who hits it left-footed, across goal and in at the far post. A bit of defensive snoozing there.
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77 mins: Another substitution, this one for Sunderland. Altidore is coming on for Wickham.
76 mins: It occurs to me that if your team had the chance to create a one-match-only, never-to-be-sold kit, you’d be a bit disappointed if they came up with a tasteful white-with-blue-flecks number. They could have done anything. Silver, gold, glitter, pictures of the players’ mums, anything. It was a free hit. And they wasted it. In substitution news, Jason Puncheon comes on for Chamakh.
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74 mins: Cattermole gets a booking, a suspension-earning fifth of the season, for fouling Chamakh.
72 mins: A bit of a bad-tempered mid-half lull here. Jedinak, too, has been booked, for fouling Wes Brown. If you’re in need of a musical interlude, here’s Everton’s Leon Osman pretending he’s the Fresh Prince. Boom!
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71 mins: Pantilimon gets a yellow card for faffing about at a free-kick and trying to take it from wherever he fancies.
69 mins: Memo for Palace players: don’t cross to the far post.; There’s never anybody there. Meanwhile, as Bernie Reeves points out, though the own goals have been flying in wherever Sunderland go of late, it could be worse.
66 mins: Davie Provan on Sky of the Vergini shot of a few minutes ago: “If anything he hit it too well.”
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65 mins: Sunderland’s possession retention here is almost comically abysmal. They need to get the ball, keep it for a minute, slow everything down a bit, but they seem unable.
64 mins: This time Zaha doesn’t even attempt a run, and instead bends a mean ball, right-footed from the left, that forces Pantilimon into a diving push-to-safety.
63 mins: I always get the sense that Zaha is disappointed, and a bit confused, if he goes on a run in the penalty area and isn’t brought down. Which is what happens here – his cross is rubbish, but when he gets the ball a moment later, outside the penalty area, Buckley brings him down, and earns a booking.
Updated
61 mins: Sunderland, on a rare foray forward, win themselves a corner. Larsson’s kick is cleared, hoisted back into the box and finally drops to Vergini, whose stinging shot is saved.
58 mins: The crowd is roaring now, and wound-up home players are throwing themselves into challenges – and winning most of them.
10 - Since Aug 2013, Sunderland have scored 10 own goals, more than any of their players have scored at the right end in that period. Oops.
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) November 3, 2014
Fourth own goal in sixteen days for #safc
— Jim Proudfoot (@JimProudfoot) November 3, 2014
Updated
Crystal Palace 1-1 Sunderland (Brown og, 55 mins)
That’s a corking own-goal there from calamity-magnet Wes Brown! The corner eventually leads to a cross from the left that lands on the forehead of Chamakh, five yards out. He had to score there, simply had to, but he gave Pantilimon a chance to save, and save he did. Campbell, though, backheeled the ball back into the danger area and Brown was on hand to slam it into his own net, off the inside of the post.
Updated
55 mins: Campbell has a shot blocked for another Palace corner, the manyth of many.
53 mins: Palace continue to push unconvincingly. They haven’t really worked the ball into Sunderland’s penalty area with real menace since the 25th second.
51 mins: Is Marouane Chamakh the Bobby Charlton de nos jours? Which isn’t to say that he’s a brilliant player and extremely down-to-earth man who’ll be talked about reverentially for generations, just that he’s trying quite badly to hide his baldness.
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49 mins: Palace are still huffin’ and a-puffin’. A couple of corners and a couple of crosses from open play, none of which come to much except more of the same. At the end of it all, Sunderland have a throw-in and Scott Dann has a cut above his right eye.
47 mins: Palace win a free kick on the left, leading to a few seconds of penalty-area madness and eventually a Zaha shot being blocked for a corner.
Peeeeeeeeeeep!
46 mins: The second half has begun.
Palace’s fans have brought along a couple of massive banners protesting against the idea of playing Premier League games abroad (read all about the plan here):
“He is losing control of this game,” writes Ray in Houston of Phil Dowd. “Arguably, he did that in the first minute when he let a blatant penalty go. After Clattenburg’s mess last week (for which the FA found a way to punish him without admitting he made any mistakes), it’s hard not to be paranoid as a Palace fan.” Three games ago Warnock ripped into Craig Pawson for his refereeing in the game against Chelsea, which I’m not sure was entirely justified. In two games since Palace have got nothing. It’s almost certainly a coincidence, but failing that it’s the referees’ union in full effect.
Half-time: Crystal Palace 0-1 Sunderland
45+5 mins: And that is half time. Palace are about to endure a Warnock rocket, as indeed is the fourth official as the pair of them slope off towards the dressing-rooms.
Updated
45+4 mins: Buckley plays Cattermole into trouble in his own half, but the Sunderland player falls over and the referee donates a charitable free-kick.
45+2 mins: Good pressure from Sunderland, ending with Buckley pulling the ball back from the byline and Vergini half-volleying towards the near post, where Speroni saves.
45+1 mins: Into stoppage time, of which there’ll be at least four minutes. Meanwhile, and not entirely relevantly, but still, this just in from Israel, where the Tel Aviv derby has been abandoned after a Maccabi player got into a scrap with a fan:
43 mins: Zaha, now on the left, makes another good turn and run into the area, but this time he is tackled cleanly, by O’Shea.
41 mins: The corner, though, is flicked on by a Sunderland head to a second Sunderland head, headed back to a third Sunderland head – actually the same as the first Sunderland head, belonging to Wickham – whose effort on goal was a bit weak.
40 mins: Fletcher turns beautifully and lashes a 20-yarder straight at Speroni with his left foot. Nice touch, optimistic shot.
37 mins: Van Aanholt is stretchered off, greedily sucking down gas ‘n’ air. Recent calamity-magnet Wes Brown will come on.
34 mins: This appears to be a possible dislocation, which would be the end of the Dutchman’s evening.
33 mins: Zaha, down the other end, flies past Van Aanholt and into the penalty area, only for the defender to fly in and bring him down. Corner, says the referee (another poor call – it looked a free-kick to me), while Van Aanholt stays down, clutching his shoulder, and is now receiving treatment.
GOAL! Crystal Palace 0-1 Sunderland (Fletcher, 31 mins)
Some decent work down the left from Sunderland ends with (a questionably offside) Van Aanholt chipping a cross into the middle which Fletcher heads from 12 yards. There’s not a lot of pace in either cross or header, but it flies perfectly just inside the post and Speroni is helpless.
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29 mins: Larsson, on the right wing, takes the ball past Chamakh, whose attempt to tackle is about as comical as attempted challenges can be, and ends with Palace player on his derriere and Sunderland player scampering unmolested into space.
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28 mins: The evening’s second shot from open play also comes from Bolasie, and – I’m searching for positives here – is better than the first.
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26 mins: Sunderland have perhaps wisely decided to take the wind out of Palace’s sails, by taking the ball and doing nothing with it for a while. It ends with a hopeful punt forward flying straight through to Speroni.
23 mins: The evening’s first shot from open play comes from Bolasie – about 30 yards out, left of goal – and goes for a throw-in.
21 mins: Palace are still on top, and they seem to be doing everything in their power to avoid central midfield altogether – the ball is going straight to the forwards, or out to the wings, but never through the middle.
18 mins: Zaha wins a corner, which Bolasie takes, and Jedinak misses a slightly awkward volley chance at the near post.
Updated
15 mins: Another decent cross from Zaha, but this too is too strong for Campbell. A promising opening quarter-hour, this.
14 mins: Zaha crosses from the right, which is not quite right for Campbell, who does enough in just trying to reach it to put off Chamakh.
12 mins: Phil Dowd is giving Neil Warnock a ticking off. Which is basically the opposite of what should be happening, but such is justice in football.
11 mins: Things have calmed down a bit now, with Sunderland doing a bit of pushing forward, even if they’re yet to get meaningful ball into penalty area. And, oooh, disagreement here. “You think the Crystal Palace ! is bad, my team Southampton have a hashtag,” rages Kevin Moody. “Even worse, the media team introduced it as the first hashtag on seats at football. Like its something to be proud of.”
9 mins: “#Eagles? Without the question mark, of course,” suggests Simon McMahon for the Selhurst seats. “Would take a bit of seat redesign, but have the added ‘benefit’ of showing Palace are down with the kids and into all that social media nonsense. And is a hashtag punctuation anyway?” I think not. They’re basically decoration, as is the seat arrangement. They’re made for each other.
7 mins: Jordi Gomez takes it, and it smacks a member of the wall in the nose.
5 mins: “Who had the first minute in the ‘at what minute will Phil Dowd ruin the game’ pool?’ wonders JR. It may get worse. Or indeed better, we live in hope. At the other end, Sunderland have a free-kick, five yards outside the penalty area, prime shooting zone.
Updated
5 mins: Bolasie gets to the byline on the left, but Pantilimon catches the slightly deflected cross.
3 mins: Just 25 seconds were on the clock when Campbell raced on to Chamakh’s flick there. What a start that would/should have been. Palace are still pushing, but their two crosses since – the latest from Zaha – have both flown to defenders.
Updated
1 min: An early penalty shout for Palace there, with Campbell haring into the area when Vergini stuck out a leg. The referee decides he got the ball, but replays show he was nowhere near it. That should have been a penalty, and quite possibly a red card.
Peeeeeeeeeeeeeep!
1 min: Phil Dowd blows his whistle, and Palace get the match under way.
A few last-minute hand-clasps and back-slaps and we’ll be on our way.
Sunderland are wearing a white and blue third kit for one night only, because both home and away strips clashed with Palace’s. Which they could have foreseen when they were designing them, really.
The players are entunnelled. A particularly drab tunnel at Selhurst Park, too. Anyway, action is now imminent.
“I think in this day and age the best alternative would be the winky emoticon,” suggests Henry Buckle of the Selhurst Exclamation. That would be some pretty advanced seat-design, though.
What does the world think of this exclamation mark? I know that without it there would be a blank block of seating, which might look a little awkward in the context of the stand as a whole, but I’m not sure that seating is the place for punctuation.
Now Neil Warnock has had his turn facing the Sky microphone.
I thought we were unlucky at West Brom, we played very well. I’ve been very pleased so far, but we have to keep getting points. I think everybody knows that everything you get from the top clubs is a bonus, but everybody else is up against it. We’re no different to everybody else.
Sunderland? We haven’t got great results either. I know their result was horrendous at Southampton but before that they were doing alright. There are no easy games in this league. We just have to make sure that they know they’re in a game, and that’s what we’re preparing to do. There are special nights, and as we saw last year the crowd can turn any game.
Gus Poyet has been a-chattin’ to Sky:
The idea is to go back to basics. Before Southampton we were a difficult team to play against, not concede too many goals. The idea is to go back to that. The idea for us is to start the game thinking of winning, first and most. And after that, depend on the game. You need to be spot on for 90 minutes and that’s what we’ll try today. A win would show we were in a good run, we had a terrible accident on the way and we’re trying to recover from that. It would be very important.
Here’s the Press Association’s take on the teams:
Gus Poyet dropped out-of-form goalkeeper Vito Mannone for Sunderland’s Barclays Premier League trip to Crystal Palace as Costel Pantilimon came in. Having conceded 10 goals in his previous two outings, including an 8-0 thrashing at Southampton, Mannone missed out as former Manchester City stopper Pantilimon was handed a league debut. There was also a full debut for experienced full-back Anthony Reveillere who replaced Wes Brown in the Black Cats’ defence whilst Connor Wickham and Jordi Gomez also returned for Poyet’s side after sitting out the 2-0 loss at Arsenal.
Crystal Palace made just one alteration from their 2-2 draw at West Brom as Scott Dann recovered from a knee injury to replace Adrian Mariappa in defence.
In my list of things Neil Warnock hates, I somehow left off Ed Sheeran.
So Sunderland drop Vito Mannone and Wes Brown after recent defensive humiliations. This can only improve matters, surely?
The teams!
The teams again, in more formal style, with substitutes and a referee and everything.
Crystal Palace: Speroni, Kelly, Hangeland, Dann, Ward, Bolasie, Jedinak, Ledley, Zaha, Campbell, Chamakh. Subs: Mariappa, Doyle, Hennessey, Gayle, McArthur, Bannan, Puncheon.
Sunderland: Pantilimon, Vergini, O’Shea, Reveillere, Van Aanholt, Larsson, Cattermole, Gomez, Buckley, Fletcher, Wickham. Subs: Bridcutt, Brown, Johnson, Altidore, Mavrias, Graham, Mannone.
Referee: Phil Dowd.
Today’s starting XIs, as told to Twitter:
Palace team to play @Sunderlandafc: Speroni, Kelly, Hangeland, Dann, Ward, Jedinak, Ledley, Zaha, Bolasie, Chamakh, Campbell.
— Crystal Palace FC (@CPFC) November 3, 2014
Sunderland: Pantilimon, Reveillere, van Aanholt, O'Shea (c), Vergini, Cattermole, Larsson, Gomez, Buckley, Wickham, Fletcher.
— Sunderland AFC (@SunderlandAFC) November 3, 2014
Hello world!
They don’t like Mondays, do Sunderland. If you’ve read anything about this game, you’ll have read that they haven’t got a very good recent record on this particular day of the week. But here, for the sake of completeness, is your very own cut-out-and-keep guide to each manager’s personal dislikes. The funny thing here is that most people like Gus Poyet, but he hates a lot of things, where as lots of people hate Neil Warnock, and he only dislikes a few things. Funny old world, innit?
Things Gus Poyet doesn’t like:
- Mondays. As you may have read, it is 12 and a half years since Sunderland last won a televised Monday fixture (against Leicester on April Fools’ Day 2002, as it happens). Since then they’ve lost 12 and drawn eight of 20.
- Neil Warnock. Their one previous managerial meeting, a 2-2 draw between Leeds and Brighton – precisely two years and one day ago, as it happens, and also on a weeknight (it was a Friday) – ended acrimoniously with Leeds insisting that they should have got a penalty (Warnock: “Luke Varney got pushed, you can see he got pushed”) and Brighton that they shouldn’t (Poyet: “If it was my player he dived, but because it was his player he was pushed. We call it hypocrisy. He’s in the list of hypocrites now, Neil, unfortunately. He went to the other side. Hypocrite.”)
- Football people who write autobiographies (like Neil Warnock). “I’m not a fan of football people writing books. I hate these books. You can’t say one day that what happens in the dressing room stays in the dressing room, then write a book. I don’t care who you are, I don’t like it.”
- Excuses. And relegation. “I hate excuses, but I’ve got a lot of them. I’ve got a list. If I gave you everything that happened, Mamma Mia I’ve got excuses. I cannot say what my best one is. I’m not allowed to say. If we go down I am going to be responsible. I am not going to say how much, but I will take my responsibility naturally. I will hate it. I will be devastated, but that’s part of the job and the challenge.”
- Losing 6-1 (as he did, when at Brighton, against Liverpool in the FA Cup. “I hate it. I didn’t talk for two days. It doesn’t matter that we were playing Liverpool, who are a top team, away at Anfield – I hate it. I was sitting in my office and wanted to make a hole in the ground and go in and hide for ever.”
- Losing 8-0. And excuses. “I don’t use excuses. I hate excuses. I thought it was not going to be our day, but not as bad as this. It was worse. It hurts because I hate losing 1-0. Imagine eight.”
- Speaking to referees when he’s a bit miffed. “I won’t ask them because I don’t like the answers, I don’t. That’s one of the things I hate the most nowadays, when people use words to get away from situations.”
- Promising things. “I’m calm. If I was a player here I’d be calm too. They know where they’re standing. That’s the way I work. I hate promising things.”
- Getting sacked: “I don’t want to get the sack. I hate getting the sack, the feeling’s terrible.”
- The word “confidence”. “I am proud of the players. They kept going and it was not easy. It’s going to give us a bit more of that word I hate – confidence.”
Neil Warnock hates
- Two or three managers. “There are two or three managers I just can’t stand. I detest them. So far I’ve kept to myself what I hate about them. But what they say gets a lot of coverage. I’d love to come back and give my version. I’d like to tell everybody why I dislike these people.”
- Guilty smiles: “I hate officials smiling when they’ve done something wrong – it really bugs me.”
- Injections. “We had our flu jabs. All the players have one. They are not forced to but it makes sense in such a closed environment. I hate jabs, I’m such a coward I have to look away. So we had to clear the room of players, I didn’t want them seeing me like that.”
- Marmite. Sometimes. “Some people use the word ‘Marmite’ about me. Sometimes I like Marmite and sometimes I hate it. But it’s a good product.”
- Litter. “The first thing I’ll do is clear the dug-out area of any litter, water bottles, paper, tape, that sort of thing. I hate any litter in my area. I tell the staff all the time during the game, ‘Get rid of that bottle’, ‘Clear that away’.”
- Players rushing off the bus with headphones on. “I hate to see players rushing off the bus with headphones on going straight into the building when they could sign one or two autographs. When I get off the bus I always sign every autograph I can on both sides of the pathway leading from the bus to the dressing rooms.”
- Traffic. “I hate being in traffic, it’s a real bugbear of mine, so I always try and move near the training ground when I join a club.”
- Penalty shoot-outs. “Personally I detest penalty shoot-outs.”
Good evening. Simon will be here soon enough. While you wait, you can read about how the Sunderland manager, Gus Poyet, has said that his side’s dismal record in Monday matches is difficult to accept before their clash with Crystal Palace.
Sunderland do not like Mondays. With none of the past 20 matches they have played on the first evening of the working week having resulted in a win, Gus Poyet could probably do without Monday night’s televised trip to Crystal Palace.
“It’s a terrible statistic,” said Sunderland’s manager, who is said to have come close to resigning following a 5-1 Monday thrashing at Tottenham last spring. “It’s not a nice record, it’s difficult to accept and it’s not normal.”
Unfortunately “normal service” for Sunderland in the past few seasons has involved annual relegation skirmishes and they are already back in the bottom three. Tensions concerning the quality and depth of player recruitment are straining Poyet’s relationship with his board while the Uruguayan’s standing with supporters has been damaged by the recent 8-0 surrender at Southampton.
Should Sunderland stutter at Selhurst Park, cameras are likely to be trained on his face but he refuses to feel intimidated. “That would be very unlucky for the viewers,” he said. “I’d prefer my team to be showing everyone what we can do.”
