Palace caught short by role reversal

The words “toothless” comes to mind when describing Monday night’s performance and subsequent 1-0 loss against Sunderland.

If you had to act out a role reversal in its true form, you would have acted out Monday’s game. The emphasis was on Palace to go and win the game and Sunderland sat deep, were organised out of possession and broke with speed – does that remind you of anyone? Palace had the lion’s share of possession, more shots and more corners but never really and truly looked like making that dominance pay.

Pardew had it right when he said that we didn’t do enough to win the game. Everything was good until we reached the edge of the Sunderland box where we ran out of ideas, we licked penetration and real incision in the final third.

Once again it was a personal error that led to the goal and that is one of the most frustrating things. I don’t believe a knee jerk decision is necessary but for me, Hennessey was undoubtedly at fault. Say what you like about Dann being responsible for clearing his lines, the goalkeeper can’t come steaming out in the manner that he did and then stop and retreat – it’s got to be all or nothing. Looking at that from Dann’s perspective what he has to do is obvious, he sees the goalkeeper is sprinting out to clear it – get yourself between Defoe and the ball.

If Hennessey doesn’t come, Dann clears it.

If Hennessey commits properly, Hennessey clears it.

We managed to engineer the only possible situation in which they could score and after banging our head against the brick wall that was Sunderland’s defence it is frustrating that an error like that cost us the one point we did have.

Last night demonstrated exactly the point I made in my last blog - 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. Monday proved that – all of a sudden the emphasis was on Palace to go out there and stamp their authority on the game against a side who were content to defend deep and attempt to hit us on the counter. On Monday we came up short.

This scenario will happen again, of that much I am sure, but if we are to be as successful as we can be then we must do better in these types of game. This has to start on Saturday with Newcastle, 3 points against them will demonstrate that we can manage the expectation of being favourites and deliver results in this type of situation.