Those who follow such things might notice that I rarely do previews.
My strong preference is to analyse and report matches but we were short of a previewer and I stepped in to cover Wednesday’s match between Arsenal and Crystal Palace. When I grew up in South London, Palace was the nearest professional club to my home and just before I married I could walk to the ground (and frequently did) in about twenty minutes. Many of my friends are Palace fans and a pretty thankless task it has been following them over the years. They do not have a glorious history!
But they do have a (disputed) claim to fame. Some of their fans believe they are the oldest professional football club in the world. Crystal Palace, just to confuse you, was first erected in Hyde Park in 1851 for the first international trade fair to be held in Britain. The design and concept of the original edifice was rejected and a crafty entrepreneur bought the concept and moved the project close to Sydenham Hill in South East London.
A group of workers formed a football team in 1861 but it was soon disbanded and the club that we recognise today was finally formed in 1905 which makes it exactly as old as Chelsea.
Palace had very little success in the first fifty or so years of their existence but their ground at Selhurst Park was conveniently situated for the railway and like any London ground, car parking is at a premium. I’ve probably watched fifty or sixty games there since I started going. They were in the old Fourth Division when I first went there in 1960. The star player was a fine striker called Johnny Byrne who moved on to gain honours and England caps with West Ham. He was replaced by Cliff Holton, an ex- Arsenal striker, and he led them into the Second Division. They had a high turnover of managers but under Dick Graham they made progress and, led by a very unlikely character in Bert Head, they made their fans dreams come true by getting promotion to the old First Division in 1969-70. They managed to stay up for several seasons and though there was an element of boom and bust the club really started to look up in the 1980s when Terry Venables became coach and they briefly threatened to win honours . They have now been in the Premier League continuously for more than ten years and their performances have been extremely consistent or to put it another way, rather boring.
Palace have never won a major trophy, never been in Europe and our main link with them is Ian Wright whom we signed from them in 1991. I am fond of the club and desperately hope they win the Cup this season but their supporters are huge pessimists, having seen them fail so often at the last hurdle!
Their form this season has swung from alarming – they started the season very poorly – to impressive. They recently recorded a slew of fine away victories and in the FA Cup quarter final at Fulham they were extremely impressive. But since then they have lost 5-2 at C130y and were heavily beaten last week by Newcastle .
Their manager Oliver Glasner came from Eintracht Frankfurt where he won the Europa League. He is often an advocate of three at the back with Guehi marshalling the defence containing the impressive Frenchman, Lacroix. Munoz, the prolific Colombian and Mitchell make two very good wing-backs. The midfield is strong with Adam Wharton and Lerma providing holding quality but their star is Eberechi Eze who is a player many of us would like to see in red and white. Mateta is a fine striker and his deputy is one of our own Eddie Nketiah. Sarr, the other striker is quick and dangerous.
The thing about Wednesday’s match is that both clubs have other much bigger priorities. Aside from our Champions League tie with PSG six days after the Palace match, Palace, safe from relegation, are very preoccupied by a potentially winnable Cup semi-final with Villa at Wembley. This is a game that both teams want to exit from with no injuries. Three points would almost certainly qualify us for the Champions League next season but expect significant rotation on both sides.
I suspect this may be a decent guess at the Arsenal side
Raya
Timber White Kiwior Tierney
Partey Zinchenko
Martinelli Nwaneri Trossard
Merino
I believe Palace at their best would create formidable problems but they have other fish to fry. We beat them 5-1 at Selhurst a few days after we knocked them out of the Carabao Cup. I’m predicting a 2-1 victory. Let’s do the treble over them and hope that both sides can prepare happily for the bigger challenges just around the corner.
First things first this morning. With matches coming thicker and faster than Aaron Lennon I completely missed Bath’s excellent report on the dust up at Ipswich. It’s a shame when a team wins promotion to the Premier League with a manager who has a reputation for playing football but a squad of players who are not capable of doing so at their newly won level. The only way they can compete is to “get in people’s faces” and when they still find themselves outclsssed to “get in their Achilles tendons”.
Ipswich aren’t the first to do it and won’t be the last. It requires a very strong referee to set the limits from the off. Kavanagh didn’t have his worst game for us but that is a bar that only an undernourished worm could limbo under. At least he gave Davis a ref card for his assault in Saka but how tragic it would have been for Bukayo, us and football in general had Saka been forced out of the upcoming Champions League semi final – especially so soon after months out following hamstring surgery.
I wouldn’t worry too much about Saka in this case as he was able to carry on – and particularly after the 15 minute half time break. I expected to see ice applied automatically to contain any swelling. I would have him on the bench against Palace and I think Arteta will want to give him at least 30 minutes to maintain his match rhythm. Fingers crossed.
Thanks TTG for your rare but enjoyable excursion into preview territory, a very succinct summary of the situation and a helpful reminder of Palace fans amusingly delusional claims – oldest club my arse! I suppose Palace do have the comfort of not facing Jesus tonight as he stuck 5 past them in those two games earlier this season but I think we can still get a few goals if we put our minds to it – another 4-0 to The Arsenal
No idea who MA will pick but I think Saliba will start and so will MLS.
I wonder if Merino will move back up front as I think Palace will be
short of CBS and possibly vulnerable in the middle.
Nothing to do with the Palace game but it was a good piece for Liew so
I thought I’d share
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/apr/22/pundits-showy-partisanship-reflects-footballs-embrace-of-fan-centric-populism
Thanks TTG for stepping up – especially as you’ve been under the weather. I used to prefer doing previews to post match stuff but they take such a long time and I’ve had a rash of appointments to attend lately. Hopefully back on track very soon.
Like Matt, I think Saliba will start as the more he and Kiwior play together right now the better. There’s a good argument for the rest of your selection with Benny moving over to right back. We’ll see. These are the games to garner points with the CL coming up again and Liverpool and Newcastle still to come.
Thanks TTG
I think the only time I recognisably (i.e.close up) made in onto the tv at a game was against Palace sometime in the 60’s or 70’s which are of course difficult years to remember, especially if you were there.
Apart from a top-notch partnership between Ian Wright Wright Wright and Mark Bright there’s not much else to worry the memory cells about Palace at all.
I hope we smash them but, above all, no injuries please.
2-0 all day long.
UTA
And, just on a different tack, if the Spuds were somehow able to win the whatever league or whatever it is, how do we feel about them retaining Angeball for next season>
UTA.
Cheers TTG.
It might be a very strange match due to both clubs’ other commitments. Especially as the past weekend has been very good to us in putting a little pressure off in the league.
I really don’t know what to expect. But I hope for no injury.
Matt
Thanks for attaching the article by Liew . It makes a very interesting point .
As for Selhurst Park I once went to a game that they needed to win to stay in the First Division . They made it and there was a pitch invasion .
In the end it was quicker to exit via the pitch . I could not believe a top level football match had been played on it. I’m not unfamiliar with meadows and ploughed fields and it resembled a very deeply ploughed field . Nothing could be further from pitch technology circa 2025 . My size twelve wellies would have been very useful . I was in awe that any sort of football match could be played on it
A fine preview, TTG, but surely Bert Head’s successor, Big Mal Allison, deserves a shout-out among the pantheon of Palance managers? I remember my first visit to Selhurst Park seeing him strut the touchline in a long leather coat and trademark fedora.
In other managerial news, Jack Wilshere has taken over at Norwich as caretaker manager until the end of the season following the sacking of Johannes Hoff Thorup and Aaron Ramsey has done the same at Cardiff following the sacking of Omer Riza.
In shirt news, we are rumoured to be going back to an all-red and white home shirt next season. The white panel and blue trim down the sides will be gone. So will be the blue Adidas stripes on the shoulders and arms, which will be red. The new shirts will also have a faint baseball-style A print as a background.
I think Mikel Arteta will want to guarantee a win tomorrow night and it wouldn’t surprise me greatly to see the team that started at Ipswich do the same again with a full week ahead to the CL game.
Comfortable at half time, he’ll ring a few changes and we’ll see Tierney, Timber, Nwaneri, Partey and NB-O join the fray.
A comfortable home win, I fancy which should lock in a remarkable second place finish without our forward line for a third of the season, likewise our captain and Gabriel the colossus, 5 ridiculous red cards and two ‘only given against the Arsenal’ penalties.
Mike mcDonald prompted me to take a look at the second coming of Aaron Ramsey, Oihan Sancet, on Youtube. He looks pretty good on there.
Enjoy the game, Holics.
Best of luck to Aaron and Jack – it seems like only yesterday we were talking
about whether you could fit them both in the same midfield.
@10 Ned, Allison was fun, I read one of his books, Colours of my Life I think it was called and it was about his early years and also his time as a professional gambler. I think it was a “written with » type thing but he was entertaining in print too.
Has anyone mentioned Kenny Sansom yet?
OM@14: Allison gets bonus points for saying, when bemoaning the incessant coverage in the red tops of his salacious personal life, that both his wives were complaining about it — and that from a man once photographed by the News of World in the players’ bath at Selhurst Park with Fiona Richmond, a ‘glamour actress’, as porn stars were called in the ’70s. The FA, always the first to get a joke, charged Allison with bringing the game into disrepute.
BtM@12: There is a touch of Declan Rice in Oihan Sancet’s physique and how he runs, which can’t be a bad thing.
Matt @14, I was going to observe that KS3 was our next best signing from Palace after IW8 but it slipped my mind. That swap deal for Clive Allen was certainly a good deal for Arsenal but it was a very strange deal given that Allen had only signed a couple of weeks earlier and never wore our shirt in anger – does anyone know anything about that episode?
Bath@17: Here’s a couple of articles about it, though neither has a convincing explanation.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2340177/Clive-Allen-joined-Arsenal-33-years-ago-today-left-months.html
I like the conspiratorial twist to the Daily Mail’s suggestion that Terry Venables, then Palace’s manager, engineered the three way deal, but the Mail, unhelpfully, then half shoots down its own theory.
Has no one else noticed that TTG is a self confessed pitch invader! Football banning order I’d say.
Ned @18, thanks for those links. None the wiser, really. Maybe it really was as Terry Neill said.
SP @18, e’s a reglar pillar of society now, donchaknow?
SP@19: The bigger question is, was he ever in the Selhurst Park bath, and if so, who with?
Well I never knew that! Thanks for a most informative and illuminating run down of Palace’ history, TTG. My earliest memories of them are from the mid-late 70’s when I loved their white kit with the diagonal stripe, surely an idea from the dapper, not to say dandy, Big Mal. They had some lovely players to watch, notably Vince Hilaire and, later to abase himself by playing for Them Lot, Peter Taylor. There was something visually spectacular about watching those wingers in that strip sashaying up and down the line.
I also seem to recall a few other connections – Paul Barron, Peter Nicholas, George Wood. We’ll gloss over Eddie McGoldrick.
I’m hoping that since they are 6 points above Everton below them and European football is highly unlikely, they take their foot off the gas today and play rather more of a mix ‘n match side. I fancy Arteta to start a strong side, Saka rested though I hope, after the assault from the agricultural tool at the weekend, as 3 points today would move us a whole lot closer to guaranteeing CL football.
@22 – it’s CER with shades of Jules and Sandy. Boner, Mr ‘Orne !
Ooh, have a vada at Trev’s dolly old eek!
Oh and Trev, ‘ow’s yer lallies?
Me lallies are fit to burst with excitement anticipatin’ a good old one two up the Grove tonight – simply fantabulosa !
Trev & CER: Bold!
😂😂😂😂
Arsenal: Raya, Timber, Lewis-Skelly, Saliba, Kiwior, Partey, Rice, Odegaard, Sterling, Martinelli, Trossard.
Subs: Neto, Tierney, Zinchenko, Gower, Henry-Francis, Butler-Oyedeji, Kabia, Nwaneri, Saka.
4 changes. Strong team
No Benny Blanco and a lot of yoofs on the bench.
Any time Sterling starts, I have a “We’re playing with ten men” kind of feeling. Hopefully he’ll dispel forever any doubts on his capabilities tonight.
Cheers TTG for a great preview – lots of interesting stuff..
A little strange that Sterling has been chosen ahead of Nwaneri 🤔
A comfortable win with no injuries please.
COYRRR
Merino going to be important next week with no Partey – just a night off ? White a bit more worrying – obvs coukd just be time management after the weekend which was his first game back (again)
Strange low intensity game. Three really good goals Eze’s was a worldie.
Sterling a total passenger. Raya having maybe his worst game of the season. Kiwior having a storming match.
60 mins of Sterling just about my max.
I think we’re trying to get all of our mis-passes out of our system before we meet PSG.
And Raya showing every one of his poorest techniques, moves and throws because we won’t get to see them next week.
We’re going to break our “give the ball away to the other team’ record tonight.
Well that’s been coming all night
Better team has now equalised. Still time for them to win.
A sloppy night of side-to-side passing. Outshot and out=paced by the Eagles. Disappointing.
Let us never speak of this game again.
We move onwards to the semi final of the champions league.
I’ll say that again.
WE MOVE ONWARDS TO THE SEMIFINAL OF THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE!
Mentally, we already had.
What game was that ?
My only memory was a scintillating throw in taken by Raheem Sterling . Seriously have we ever signed a bigger load of junk. Dennis Suarez, remember him, was positively Maradonian in comparison.
If we could sign Eze I’d be well happy as we Cockneys say . I will get my people working on it . Watch this space
Keep watching
Still watching ?
Keep watching – don’t let your attention drift. Big transfers only happen through perseverance .
And lots of wonga
Transfer negotiations not going well. My team can’t spell Eze .
When I point out it is a palindrome they suggest that may be illegal
>>>>>>>