There were no “bollockings” planned by Sam Allardyce after a 14th loss from Crystal Palace’s last 20 Premier League home matches on Saturday left them mired in the relegation zone. “They didn’t deserve one today,” shrugged the former England manager. “It doesn’t happen as often as it used to, put it that way.”
Five matches into his reign at Selhurst Park, Palace have picked up just one point under Allardyce and suffered four successive defeats. The latest – a battling but ultimately futile performance against an in-form Everton side inspired by a revitalised Ross Barkley – was by no means as bad as the previous two against Swansea City and West Ham United, yet the result was the same.
Less than four months after he lost his “dream” job in such acrimonious circumstances, Allardyce is struggling to have the impact that he and Palace’s owners would have expected from a manager with the proud record of never being relegated.
He even seemed to welcome the controversy surrounding Séamus Coleman’s winning goal six minutes from time while his marker, Jeffrey Schlupp, went down with cramp at the other end and rolled back on to the pitch, with Allardyce also claiming the Everton wing-back was offside from Tom Davies’s pass. But with a crucial run of fixtures to come in the next few weeks that include home matches against his former club Sunderland and Middlesbrough at Selhurst Park, he was honest enough to admit the first few weeks of his post-England career have not exactly gone to plan.
“I expect a lot myself. It’s a process of adjusting to my methods which can’t happen overnight,” said Allardyce. “I will try and continue to grow the players to get better, and try and say: ‘I’ve been here before, I know what it takes to get out of this particular predicament, and I can only do that if you respond to what we do.’”
He added: “That is a day-to-day process that’s ever relenting from now until the end of the season. If we get safe it’ll be the last two weeks, if we’re lucky. It was the same at Sunderland: it was two games to go before we got safe, it’ll be the same for us all down there. We’ll have our ups, we’ll have our downs; we’ll have to put something like four or five wins on the trot together, which can happen, if you get the right belief going quickly.”
The three-man defence deployed against Everton at least showed some much-needed signs of increased stability that is his trademark, while Loïc Rémy’s return from injury could provide support for Christian Benteke until Wilfried Zaha is back from the Africa Cup of Nations. New recruits will also be vital, however, with Allardyce remaining hopeful after a fortnight spent trawling through videos of potential signings.
“I’ve had that many players on my desk the last two weeks, looked at that many reports, watched so many games, that in the end we got them to file all that down,” he said. “We thought we’d have got more but we haven’t, so we’re on the next dozen or so players we filed down, and will look at carefully, to not panic in this moment. Making the players better than we’ve already got is my goal as quickly as possible.”
Ronald Koeman already seems to have had that effect on Everton. A fourth clean sheet and victory in five matches has helped rescue a season that appeared to be drifting, with a run of winnable fixtures to come. “We needed to play with more aggression,” said Koeman. “From the beginning of December when we played Arsenal at home, I see a difference with how the team play and how compact we are and the team is on a good run.”
