Crystal Palace Fan View: Two games for Pardew to salvage his job

We’re a few days on from the embarrassment at Swansea and now the dust has settled, it turns out nothing has changed. I’m certain I wasn’t the only one checking social media and the Palace website half expecting an announcement regarding his future but for the time being at least, it seems as though Alan Pardew is hanging onto his job.

Honestly, I’m not surprised Alan Pardew fights on to see another day, even though I personally thought his time was up. It is clear that the board’s support is wavering though, if media reports are to be believed then he’s got two games to salvage his job, making Southampton at home this weekend and next weekend’s trip to Hull all the more important for our future this season.

On a wider note, it’s not been a great week in general for Palace. The loss to Swansea was shocking on so many levels, but bad news has continued to trickle out of the club all week. First came the injury news regarding Connor Wickham who injured his cruciate on the weekend and will subsequently miss ‘months’ as he recovers from that setback. With Loic Remy’s return being pushed back after a complication we really couldn’t afford to lose Wickham, their dual absence leaves us scarily short in attack – there’s even less alternatives for Pardew to turn to if things aren’t working and he needs to make a change.

Then came Wilfried Zaha’s announcement that he would be switching allegiance from England to the Ivory Coast. On a personal level, I completely endorse Zaha’s decision – he is good enough to be playing on an international stage and his ridiculous exile from the England setup means his hand has been forced. Good for him.

However on a selfish, club-orientated note, I’m gutted. Wilfried’s decision to represent the Ivory Coast means he is likely to be missing for at least four games in January and given he’s arguably been our best and most consistent performer his absence will be particularly difficult to deal with. The lack of natural replacement doesn’t go far to offset this either…

We have more immediate problems than losing Wilfried in January though. If Alan Pardew is to extend his tenure beyond next weekend then there are clear issues which really must be addressed, so what areas should we be looking at for improvement?

Defending set pieces

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it twenty times: we have to do better from set-pieces. We are leading the way on the ‘goals conceded from set-pieces’ this season, running away from the competition with 13 conceded since the beginning of the season. That’s, on average, one goal conceded from a set-piece every single game. We cannot begin to imagine any upturn in form without stemming the flow of these sorts of goals.

The opposition in the Premier League is tough, even those fighting to avoid relegation have real quality in their side. As a result, the teams we’re facing week in and week out have the ability to hurt us in open play making our failings in the fundamental area of defending set-pieces even more inexcusable. If Pardew is to keep his job he has to prove himself capable of setting up his side to defend those situations properly.

Defensive organisation

The defensive issues run deeper than that though. Individuals across the back four are struggling which certainly doesn’t help; Martin Kelly looks out of sorts at left back, Scott Dann and James Tomkins have both made mistakes which have either cost us goals, or very nearly done so. As a unit, they look nothing like the hard-to-break-down group that we saw a couple of seasons ago and the hesitance and lack of confidence that’s resulted from conceding so many is not helping. Pardew said before the Swansea game that a clean sheet was the main priority and it’s important that this should be the main focus this weekend too, although a more successful attempt this weekend would be great.

Prudence if we go ahead

We went ahead against Swansea, we fought back to level-pegging against Burnley and Manchester City but as a team we weren’t shrewd enough to see the game out. Partly this goes down to our defensive struggles both from open play and set-pieces but it’s also a more general failing. We’ve shown great character to get back into games but then when we’ve been in the position to pick up some valuable points we’ve frozen. Whether that’s fitness, concentration or just confidence I’m not sure but failing to pick up anything from games we should have got something from needs to be addressed.