Good? Bad? Indifferent? Palace’s start to the season

This international break presents me with an opportunity to look back at the first 12 games of the season and assess just what Palace have achieved a quarter of the way through the season.

Ask most Palace fans what they think about the start to the season and the response you’ll get is generally very positive. The table makes for good reading – Palace sit 8^th with 19 points, a mere 2 points behind 5^th place Spurs and 11 clear of the relegation zone. However often the table doesn’t necessarily reflect the whole story and I think that this is the case to an extent with Palace. What the table doesn’t show is who you’ve picked those points up against, it doesn’t show how many players you’ve had out injured, it doesn’t show how many clear penalties shouts have been turned down… you get my gist.

Palace’s opening 12 games have seen them line-up against every single one of the top 6 from last season already and pick up 7 points against these sides with a win at Chelsea and Liverpool (again) and a draw with Manchester United. This is significant because we’ve ended up 8^th and have got the ‘tough’ games out of the way for this half of the season. Our next 6 games are Sunderland, Newcastle, Everton, Southampton, Stoke & Bournemouth – all very winnable games from a Palace point of view.

We have been affected by injuries fairly heavily so far and arguably availability in the striking position in particular has potentially cost us points. The problems up front have been a combination of three things – our fit strikers have failed to find the back of the net often enough, Wickham has been injured and Murray was sold. Chamakh is yet to feature this season, Bolasie missed the beginning of the season, Ward, Souare and Delaney have also had spells injured and Gayle recently picked up a knock. The point is that Pardew is yet to have a fully fit squad to choose from yet this season but the team has managed to make a strong start to the season.

The problems up front have meant that a lot of Palace fans look at the Murray sale and say that he should never have been sold, but I disagree. At the time we had just brought in Wickham who was clearly first in line to start up front, Bamford was signed on loan and Gayle and Campbell remained within the squad - even a clairvoyant would have struggled to predict the problems we’ve faced there. 5 players vying for one position is just not practical and Connor Wickham offers much the same physical presence, traditional ‘lone striker’ attitude that Glenn had and as much as I am ever grateful to Murray his departure solved a lot of problems and provided him with a more realistic chance at regular first team football. I don’t believe that Glenn would have been forced out of the club, he would have been afforded the choice between staying and fighting for his place and leaving and if the deal was right for him then for his sake I’m glad he left.

This season so far has been a success, there is no doubt about that, but unless we can continue to turn out performances and results like we have done in the opening 12 games then it will be for nothing. The abundance of games with opponents around or below us in the next 12 games represent a real opportunity for Palace to firm up and push on from their position in the top 10. It was our results against the teams around us at the bottom that kept us up under Pulis and it will be our results against the teams around us and below us that determine just how well this season will end up going. There is a spirit within the squad that means that we will always turn up for the games against the top teams, the games in which we are underdogs but to be a real success we must transfer that attitude into games where we are expected to win, where teams will sit back and frustrate us like we did to teams a couple of years ago.

Can we do it? Absolutely.