da pinup bet： The sacking of Frank de Boer after just 77 days brought the spotlight very much on the short-termism present in top flight football.
da brdice： During the summer, when there are no matches – and consequently no matches to lose – it’s easy to create grand plans about what kind of team you want and what kind of style you want them to play. But when the pressure is on, even after just four games of a season, it’s much tougher to ride it out as the threat of relegation starts to become more solidified.
In many ways, the sacking of De Boer reflects worse on the Crystal Palace board than on the coach himself. But at the same time, just because they made a bad decision in July doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t recognise that in September and act before the rot well and truly sets in. Whatever you think about the trigger-happy feel of the situation, surely the only saving grace for Palace, who have lost all their games without scoring a goal, is that they have 34 matches to put that right.
Rock bottom after West Ham’s win over Huddersfield, by the next time the Eagles play a football game, they could be three points adrift of the rest already. It’s a gap which can still be bridged easily enough, but it’s one that would make new manager Roy Hodgson’s first game in charge incredibly meaningful.
This weekend’s home game against Southampton arguably presents the only opportunity for the new man in charge to pick up any points for almost a month, which is worrying. Away trips to both Manchester clubs in consecutive weeks are the next two fixtures, before a home game against Chelsea. They’re three fixtures in which even one point is, surely, a bonus, but failure to beat Southampton would crank up the pressure. Winless after eight games doesn’t sound like a position most teams come back from.
The problem with De Boer’s start, then, wasn’t that he lost four games without scoring – as bad as that quite patently is – but it’s that he lost three very winnable games. The other, away to Liverpool, should have been a free hit. Much like the three games to come after hosting Saints.
So now, even though we’re very early in the season, you start to look at the fact that Palace have not just dropped nine points from 12, but have lost them in the kinds of games the Eagles need to win just to stay in the division. Now, in order to pick up the points they dropped at, say Huddersfield at home, they’ll need to win or draw much harder games. That starts to make the likes of Southampton this weekend, or Everton after the next international break, look like games they need to get something from, even if they’re usually the sorts of fixtures where you can accept playing well and losing.
When you’re not a top six side, if you drop nine winnable points, it becomes very hard to pick them back up again. It won’t have escaped the notice of Palace fans that they only survived by seven points last season.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Not yet, anyway.
For one thing, as pointed out above, the saving grace from saving your manager after four games – no matter how badly they went – is similar to the bright side of conceding a goal in the first ten minutes of a game: you have plenty of time to recover and still go on to win the game. It’s not a given that Palace will have a bad season just because they dropped winnable points. It just makes life harder.
Another thing is the lift that victory over Southampton can give a team like Palace, whose players must already feel a certain kind of rebirth.
That feeling is underlined by Saints’ own form at the moment. In their four games under new manager Mauricio Pellegrino, they haven’t fared too much better. Yes, they’ve won a game and drawn two, losing only once. But they have only actually scored in one game all season, and even that was a home victory over another crisis club, West Ham, who saw Marko Arnautovic sent off in the first half. Two Southampton games have finished 0-0 already, and they’ve also lost 2-0 twice – once to Watford in the Premier league and also to Wolves in the League Cup. Things aren’t as bad as they are at Palace, but they’re hardly rosy either.
Not that their league position should matter too much to Palace. The Eagles have been abject enough to lose to everyone anyway. But the intensity level brought about by a change in manager – even this early in the season – and the lift that the team should get might make a slow-starting opponent like Southampton the perfect game for a reset. Saints won’t have the same sense of urgency that Palace surely now have thanks to their difficult fixture list, and they won’t have the same boost. Indeed, the slow start probably emphasises the fact that they can amble along at a reasonable rate for quite a while before a difficult run of games. After Palace, Southampton face Manchester United away, but it’s not until the end of November until they face top six opposition again.
None of this is to say that Palace should win this game. If they take heart from the above, it’s only based on the supposition that the squad will indeed get a boost from the appointment of Hodgson, a man whose name generates scoffing noises and smirks these days. It also supposes that Southampton are still feeling their way into the new season slowly under their new manager, and haven’t yet found their feet. They could still do so this weekend, of course.
But above all, it supposes that Palace have made the right decision in getting rid of Frank de Boer. He looked out of his depth attempting to turn a Sam Allardyce team into one which plays a modern brand of Total Football. But then, who wouldn’t? It leaves the Selhurst Park club stuck between two stools, between wanting to play more attractive football and wanting to make sure they stay in the Premier League at all costs.
Hodgson might be the right man for the job, and this might be the perfect fixture to get points on the board and instil some belief into a team who’ve lost even the ability to score consolation goals, but even that is far from certain right now.