Crystal Palace Fan View: Stoke loss deepens Palace's woes

Once more, Palace slipped to defeat in a game billed as a ‘must-win’, albeit by a smaller margin than the Sunderland defeat a few short days ago. The result leaves Palace in the relegation zone, not cut adrift yet, but not heading the right way either.

From Palace’s perspective the first half was okay; it wasn’t especially good and it wasn’t especially bad, it was just… fine. Stoke’s Mark Arnautovic had a couple of half chances, Joe Allen went close with a header and Andros Townsend cleared off the line from a corner but we remained largely untroubled. With the exception of that header the half went by without great note, granted we didn’t create much in the process but we didn’t look too vulnerable.

The second half continued in much the same vein, at the start of the half we got in Stoke’s faces a little more, pressing a little higher up the pitch in the same manner we saw in our victory at Bournemouth but chances for Palace remained non-existent even though we were doing better territorially.

It didn’t take much to swing the game back in Stoke’s favour however. One ball over the top was about the extent of it. Patrick Van Aanholt did his job initially, coming round to cover after Damian Delaney and James Tomkins were caught out of position but then he got pinned and we failed to pick up the runners from midfield that were queuing up on the edge of the box. One of those runners was Allen and he punished Palace for another momentary slip in defence. Once the goal came even the most optimistic Palace fan would have needed extra lenses for their rose-tinted spectacles to see us getting back into the game and Palace didn’t disappoint on that note.

Crystal Palace are in a tough situation because sometimes you lose these type of games. Stoke are a mid-table side who would have inevitably gone into the game as favourites and did create the better chances. It wasn’t an awful performance by any stretch, it was certainly an improvement on the mauling we endured at Selhurst Park last week, however we can’t ignore the proverbial elephant in the room – we look like we’re doomed for the drop.

In isolation there is no shame in losing to Stoke and our performance, like I said, wasn’t all that bad but put it in the context of our season and the reaction by the fans on message boards resembles a swearing contest with the winner being the person with the most expletive-filled put down for the team. In our situation, with our run-in, games like this become ‘must-win’ games and losing them becomes unacceptable because the ramifications for our Premier League status can’t be overstated. When you’re playing a good side such as Stoke and are stuck in a rut that’s a tough ask.

Our problems were clear though, our final ball wasn’t so much rubbish as it was left back in Beckenham altogether. We could conceivably have kept a clean sheet yesterday but even if we had we didn’t look like scoring in a month of Sundays. Wilfried Zaha had one of those games where he seemed to run down blind alleys, growing ever-more frustrated as the game went on. As a result Christian Benteke looked isolated and ineffective and Palace were blunted.

After the embarrassment last week Sam Allardyce had the chance to rip the team sheet up, to give the first eleven a shake up. Joel Ward has been nowhere near the heights he reached under Tony Pulis, Wayne Hennessey has made several high-profile mistakes over the course of the season and Benteke looks as likely to score a goal as Andy Johnson is to break the record for the world’s tallest man. He didn’t make those changes, he stuck by his side and they didn’t failed to repay him – that may not be the case again the next time round.

The wider statistics also make for grim reading and I can’t paint them in anything even approaching a positive light, they make more than grim reading. Today’s loss means we’ve picked up 4 points from a possible 30 in the Premier League in the last 10 games, following a run of 8 points out of 30 in the 10 games preceding that. It’s not quite ‘Derby County’ form but it’s not likely to draw any envious looks either. There is a harmful habit of failure at the club, a habit we must kick.

Now is the point where I reach for a positive. I’m sick and tired of finding the silver lining in another defeat but this week that silver lining is that we remain in touch, we’re still in the race. We’ve seen how Hull’s fortunes have changed in the space of a few weeks, we still have that possibility to cling to and now we have two weeks in which to right this rapidly derailing train. We’ve got two weeks to get the new boys fully integrated into the team, two weeks to work on our organisation and shape and two weeks to try prepare ourselves for the battle to save our season.