Neil Warnock is not everybody’s cup of Yorkshire tea but he is giving Crystal Palace and their followers a welcome feeling of deja vu. Twelve months ago the Eagles were nesting on the bottom of the Premier League with four points from their first 11 games when Tony Pulis arrived to get them flying and to become Manager of the Year.
When their saviour left last summer the supporters feared the worst and one point from a possible 15 between 4 October and 8 November left a dispirited team out of the bottom three only on goal difference. Fortunately for all concerned, Warnock is cut from much the same well-weathered cloth as his Welsh predecessor and four points from their last two matches, including an uplifting 3-1 victory over Liverpool, have hoisted Palace up the table.
Saturday’s 1-1 draw at Swansea was as encouraging in its way as the Liverpool result, a good away point the product of a gutsy, never-say-die performance of the sort we have come to expect from Warnock’s teams. For 20 minutes Palace were so comprehensively outplayed that their manager was dreading a double-figure drubbing.
But after they took an early lead with Wilfried Bony’s sixth goal in his last seven Premier League appearances, Swansea’s finishing failed to do justice to their cultured build-up play.
Palace not only weathered the storm, they equalised with a Mile Jedinak penalty. Warnock’s battlers gave as good as they got in the second half and emerged good value for their draw.
How had Warnock brought about Palace’s improvement? “I tried everything,” he said. “You have to accept that every club in the bottom half of the table will have problems – five or six games when you get one or two points. That’s the nature of the league. You just have to believe you are better than three other teams are. We are, that’s what I think.
“We are a genuine bunch and I think the lads deserve a little bit more credit. We didn’t just beat Liverpool, we beat them well and yet the story was all about them. We got only centimetres of coverage.”
Swansea continue to play aesthetically pleasing football under Garry Monk but they have won only two of their last nine matches and have let slip 13 points from winning positions this season, a statistic that hardly augurs well for their hopes of a top-10 finish.
Monk prefers to dwell on the positives, of which victories over Manchester United, Everton and Arsenal are obvious examples, and insists 19 points from 13 matches represent an excellent start to the season.
He accepts, however, that too many chances were spurned on Saturday and expects more clinical finishing against Queens Park Rangers at the Liberty Stadium on Tuesday night.
Man of the match: Mile Jedinak (Crystal Palace)
• This article was amended on 3 December 2014. An earlier version said Swansea had let leads slip 13 times this season. That has been corrected to say Swansea has let slip 13 points from winning positions.
