A couple of quotes about this game:
Mark Hughes said "We’re reasonably pleased with a point at Palace.
Sometimes it’s not easy to get on the ball and play the game you want to.
The pitch wasn’t great today in terms of trying to play the kind of passing game we’ve been playing of late.
In the last period we didn’t really give Palace any momentum in their play, and that’s what the players and their fans thrive on.
Ideally in an attacking sense we’d have liked to have produced more, but that wasn’t able to happen and that’s credit to how well Palace defended.”
Neil Warnock's take was "It was probably a war of attrition.
It’s difficult when you get teams who have that set way and who are time-wasting from the start, and you’ve got to cope with that.
The problem we had was we didn’t keep the lead for long enough.
You’ve seen how many efforts and shots on goal we had and we had to keep the lead longer than we did, that was our biggest problem.
We were attacking trying to get the second goal, we were in a good position, and we shouldn’t get caught on the counter like that.
That was the only blip for me defensive-wise: I thought we coped quite well with whatever else they had to throw at us.”
Palace have played pretty well in the last few games but only have a couple of (vital) points to show for it. We struggle to make possession count. There's an odd sort of mirror-image effect this season as teams do to us what we did to them last season. Add to that the various injuries and suspensions, new players being bedded in, a new mananger and the after effects of the whole stupid Pulis then Moody traumas at the start of the season and I have to conclude that we are doing as well as or better than might be expected. Apart from the Red Cards, no individual player or Warnock really deserves criticism but rather some encouragement to put another disappointing day behind them and move on.
We will stay up, I'm pretty certain of that but the January Transfer Window will have to be used wisely as our biggesst problem is a lack of goals scored. We didn't score that many last season but we ( after Holloway departed) didn't concede many either. If we can change the former whilst maintaining the latter, we'll be OK.
Palace and Everton......we could each do with a bit of what the other lacks....that didn't come out quite right! I mean that we need some of the qualities in attack that Everton possessed last season and you need some of the same defensively.