Stephen's should be dropped next game, awful performance from him. To blame for the goal, and the ruled out goal.
Thought Vesty did well but Stephens was well off the pace. Not sure if his knock in the first half affected him but surely if it did then they would have taken him off instead of Bedders...
Shock horror, we come away with a poor result against a side who put XI men behind the ball. Without strengthening in midfield, we're going to continue to struggle in matches were we have the ball. Because we're not good enough, technically, to break these sides down, we revert to throwing extra bodies forward. And then that backfires horribly, when Romeu (who was appalling today) misplaces a pass to leave us wide open on the counter. (I know this comes across as a negative post, but it's not really meant to be. There will be many other games where we play teams who do want to the play, and therefore we can play our normal game. I'm fully expecting a safe mid-table finish this season. I'm just pointing out this massive achilles heel of ours still very much exists, which I think a lot of fans forget about. As illustrated by the number of people who seem to think that our squad is fine, and having someone like Smallbone feature on a regular basis is of no concern.)
Can see why Ralph wanted a left footed CB. With Vestegaards passing range opened up the second half for us.
Very disappointing. We huffed and we puffed and we were ****! Collectively just not on it. Bloody first day of the season! Just one game.
I don’t think too many are overreacting, more like extremely disappointed given the standard we were playing at a few weeks back.
Yep. Got amazing results when it meant bugger all (due to our poor start) and now we have an entire 38 game season we are back to how we started last season. Very frustrating but hopefully with Armstrong & a new CM we will get back to that level.
No fluency... sometimes it happens. No urgency... that's another matter.. Too many playing negative passes. HOW MANY TIMES DID WE GO SIDEWAYS AND BACKWARDS?
I certainly get the feeling from them that we're on the hunt for a PEH replacement (which is absolute priority number one). We had little choice but to continue with Romeu today, even though it was getting to the point where I'd have rather had Vestergaard in midfield. But I wouldn't be so sure about us getting someone in who can unlock the door. Ings was starved of service, and Palace ensured that we rarely had any space or time. We missed Armstrong today, for sure. But I'm not sure even he would have changed the result.
The pre-match build was disrupted as Ralph pointed out and it is difficult to find fluency in the first few matches but we have to play with a higher tempo against these types of well organised defensive teams that much was clear last season. Stlll we have got Spuds at home next in the league, let's go for three in a row at SMS against them!
Unfair He just happened to be the nearest defender when the ball went in There were others who were equally or even more responsible For their goal, this is what happens when you push the ball around at the back, wait till everyone is ahead of the ball and then play a poor ball to an attacker who has no space. Stephens was left with two to mark and although he wasn't positioned correctly he was positioned a darn sight more correctly than our full backs who didn't even get back and wasn't in any way culpable in our giving the ball away
Although he may well have done, because he always looks to get the ball forward and that changes games Palace wouldn't have been so comfortable as they were watching us pass the ball sideways and backwards I've said it before, we just aren't as good an attacking force without him
I was about to agree with you, until your last line. The full backs were out of place because, as you allude to, they were ahead of the ball. It was Romeu giving the ball away at that moment which horribly cost us. If we're going to push the full backs high (and without natural wide men, I can understand why Ralph wants to do that), we need someone vastly better on the ball than Romeu in the middle. Otherwise we'll be conceding a lot of those goals.
I'm not blaming the full backs, I'm saying as a team we need to protect against this happening If we can't be assured of keeping the ball because of the quality of our passing then we need to be careful of having both full backs forward at the same time
