Does Crystal Palace’s winless 2023 make you confident of victory?
There must be a contingent among every club’s fans that sighs when an opponent rocks up on a poor run of form. But Leicester City surely have one of the largest, so how are the confidence levels ahead of a trip to Selhurst Park?
100% confident of a loss. I've never seen a more obvious outcome of a game than a Crystal Palace win. I hope I'm wrong but if Twitter is anything to go by, many others are expecting the same outcome.
It should be the best possible game for us to attack to start a run towards safety, but lose it as I expect and the negativity will be off the scale.
I can't say I've watched Palace much this season but their latest managerial appointment has resulted in a very underwhelmed fanbase, which should give us some hope.
Someone save me from the 5-0 Puel-esque loss that I'm envisioning.
Becky Taylor
Nothing about this season screams ‘positive vibes’ – so naturally, this game fills me with the kind of inevitable dread that, say, squad trips abroad in the noughties would have.
I think Palace’s decision to sack Patrick Vieira and replace him with Uncle Roy is absolutely hilarious, but who knows what kind of impact it’ll have in the short term. You can’t imagine it’s a particularly happy dressing room over at Selhurst right now.
But Palace also have a home crowd that know just how important they’ll be for this run-in. The first game back after a welcome international break (where they’re concerned), new manager (ish), renewed vigour… it screams of a team that might just have a little more pep in its step for a game against fellow rivals.
In truth, I’m just scared generally right now. I’m glad our fixture list has finally turned, but that only makes each of these games to come even more meaningful. The stakes are getting higher, and when it feels like you don’t have much to hang your hopes on, it’s easy for the natural pessimist within to shout loudest.
There’s no logic there… just the sweet embrace of irrational panic. Why do we do this again?
Joe Brewin
Oh no, it had to be Palace next didn't it! The quintessential ‘difficult place to go’, even with them in terrible form and the fact we've actually done reasonably well there in the recent past.
This is probably that confirmation bias thing but, throughout the decades, when we've been good or bad, we've always seemed susceptible to helping a team or player end a bad run. Team not won in ages - here come Leicester! Striker not scored in 25 games - here's an open goal old son! A friend of mine even named the latter 'The Benteke Trophy' so I'll take the small mercy that he no longer plays for them!
On top of the fear above, Palace now have Roy Hodgson in charge who has a great record against us and they still have Wilfried Zaha who always has two of his four good games a season against our welcoming defence.
With Forest Green winning this week, Palace are the only team in England who haven't won this year. To be honest, I'd rather we were due to play Manchester City at The Etihad!
Iain Wright
Palace may not have won in the league yet this calendar year but they haven’t been getting thrashed every week either.
In their first game of 2023 they lost 4-0 at home to Tottenham and in their most recent game they shipped another four at the Emirates but in between that, it’s all been very binary. Manchester United are the only other team to score more than one against them in the league since Boxing Day.
So they feel like they might have the basis of a mid-table team and just need nudging in the right direction with a slight change of style. Who does that remind you of?
My main concern is how our players cope with the specific challenges we’ll face at Selhurst - the crowd will be on top of them, they’ll have the likes of Zaha and Olise running at them and presumably there’ll be some kind of weird new, old manager bounce (although hopefully not literally, bless him).
I’m not confident, no. But then I’m never confident. I can see us ekeing out a draw though, which helps neither team that much.
David Bevan
