Can Bolasie help end the Crystal Palace curse?

There are some teams that you play where the footballing gods seem to conspire against you to make them your bogey team, and that’s what Crystal Palace have been since their reintroduction into Premier League life in 2013.

Since that time Everton have played them six times, winning only once. In the three matches at Goodison Park, it’s been two defeats and a draw. Those home defeats had a lot of similarities given they were both 3-2 losses at key times for Roberto Martinez.

The first of those losses came when things couldn’t have been any brighter for Martinez at Everton, we had come off the back of seven straight league wins and were charging into the Champions League spots. A win on the night was almost expected, but Everton failed to deliver and maybe beginning of the end for Martinez can be traced back to that point. I remember the night as well due to Manchester City’s failure to beat Sunderland, I was sat in the stands thinking Everton had blown their chance at the Champions League, and Liverpool were going to win the title, thankfully only one of those things came true.

It was a bad defeat in a great season, and there was still optimism that Martinez was a great manager who could take us on to the next level, and yes, the majority of us actually believed that. The next home defeat happened just five months later in September. This time it wasn’t a bad result in a good season, it was a bad result in a season that was falling apart.

If that was confirmation of the decline of Martinez, it was also confirmation of the decline of Howard too. In that game he conceded a penalty for their equaliser and then was caught woefully out of position before the second goal, as he was for the third when Yannick Bolasie put the ball into the wide open space to score his first goal in the Premier League. It’s quite astounding from that point that it took a further 15 months for Tim Howard to lose his place, and 18 months for Martinez to lose his job.

The draw last season came at a bad time too, Everton had just beaten Sunderland 6-2 and Aston Villa 4-0 at home, and had hoped for a bit of continued success at Goodison Park, it wasn’t to be however and Everton couldn’t keep up the momentum. The next two matches after Crystal Palace at home were the horrible losses to Leicester City and Stoke, where we conceded three and four goals respectively.

In happier times, the last time we beat Crystal Palace at home was in 2005 when he had a 4-0 victory, where a certain James Vaughan became the youngest Premier League goal scorer of all time, taking over the record set by James Milner, who not long before took the record off Wayne Rooney.

The recent memories against Crystal Palace have been bitter ones, which sums Everton up since the fight for 4^th slipped away from us in April 2014. Only now are things starting to look up again, and hopefully Friday night is another chapter in the optimism that is increasing at the club. Yannick Bolasie was one of our main tormentors in those fixtures, hopefully he can score in the fixture again, but this time for the team in royal blue.