Zat Knight shows the thought process that gave away the penalty on Saturday. Plus, if you thought Saturday was bad, El Hadji Diouf may make your week a whole lot worse tomorrow.
I was at a meeting of Bolton Wanderers anonymous over the weekend. This is a support group that has been set up for Wanderers fans who do not live in the town, where we can get together and meet like minded people and gain strength in the support and mutual understanding of others. Most meetings end in a fist fight, well we wouldn’t be Bolton fans without infighting, but all leave in a civilised manner. And we all introduced ourselves by giving the last letter of our surname.
So, it’s not really anonymous for me.
Anyway, here are some things that I have gleaned from being at a wedding on Saturday and not watching anything of the Palace match.
If anyone thinks that a forward line of N’Gog and SKD is going to win us games, then they are now in a monority so small you could roll them up and smoke them. Zat Knight may be an improved defender but if he wants to win the undecideds over, he had better stop leaving his leg there for speedy wingers to fall over. He should also stop telling the papers that he would do it again, like some bizarre version of Pavlov’s Dog. We may complain that decisions are going against us, but this is the Championship and they will and they won’t. The referees may be pants, but none of them are Mark Clattenburg, so be grateful for small mercies. We should have signed Wellfried Zaha and not Marvin Sordell, although whether or not OC would have played him, as he seems to prefer playing middle men on the wings, would have remained to be seen. Stephen Warnock had a good debut. We may be getting better, but unless there is a sudden upturn in fortune (and by sudden we mean now) then someone should be looking for a new job on Monday, regardless of the question ‘who do you replace him with’.
It’s easy to be pessimistic, but the fact remains that with eight games gone we are in eighteenth place and showing no sign of winning games that matter. Sure, Sheffield Wednesday was a victory, but they are a poor side who have just been promoted. Our other wins have been against sides that were poor on the day but have since proved not to be. Meanwhile, despite apparently getting better, we find ourselves alongside the likes of Millwall.
Ten games they said, and those ten games run out at Millwall, a place where the players that we have, mostly Premier League, will not like to go. It is an ugly, vicious place, full of seething hatred and a will to kill. And before that, we have the return of El Hadji Diouf tomorrow, someone who may take no great pleasure in sticking the knife in, but who will do it anyway. Anyone who saw his goals on Saturday will know that we will have a problem with him tomorrow night, just as we had with Zaha on Saturday. Oh, how we could do with an El Hadji Diouf now, whatever his faults.
There were rumours banging around Twitter last night that OC had gone, although it is difficult to see the board wielding the axe before the next international break. Last night was probably a very good place to bury bad/good (delete as applicable) news with the events in Chicago, but we may as well see out the week now. I said that Palace was our best chance of getting a win in the next three games and stand by that. No matter how well we play in the middle, if we fail to score tomorrow we will lose. In fact, I think we may need to get two.
But we will deal with that in the match preview that either Al or I will give you as he moves towards full fitness. Until then.