Crystal Palace v Chelsea: Premier League – live!
07-Jul-2020 16:44:51 | The Guardian
Frank Lampard is asked how he expects mid-table Palace to perform. “A team fighting at the bottom of the table will have their own reasons. A team in Palace’s position will want points to keep going up the table, because they’re professionals, but maybe they can be somehow more relaxed. What I do know is, they’ve a great manager. I worked under Roy. And they’ve got great quality players so it’ll be a hard game on its own merits.”
Roy Hodgson is asked what target he’s set his players in these final five games. “Get through them, quite frankly. It was never going to be easy, it was a difficult programme for us. We’ve always known three games a week is not something our squad is set up to do, because we have a lot of experienced players and a lot of players who are a little bit older. So it’s going to be an uphill struggle but we’ll do the best we can.”
Selhurst Park is usually one of the most atmospheric grounds in the country. This damn virus. A nice touch here, then, as the Palace squad make sure the 25,000-odd folk who normally create a rare old racket in this corner of south London know they’re very much missed.
Palace make two changes from the XI named at Leicester. Scott Dann and Cheikhou Kouyate replace Mamadou Sakho and Jairo Riedewald, who both drop to the bench.
Just the one change for Chelsea. N’Golo Kante tweaked his hamstring against Watford, so his place goes to Scotland’s highly promising Billy Gilmour.
Crystal Palace: Guaita, Ward, Dann, Cahill, van Aanholt, McArthur, Milivojevic, Kouyate, Ayew, Benteke, Zaha.
Subs: Meyer, Townsend, Sakho, Hennessey, McCarthy, Woods, Mitchell, Pierrick, Riedewald.
Chelsea: Arrizabalaga, James, Zouma, Christensen, Azpilicueta, Gilmour, Barkley, Mount, Willian, Giroud, Pulisic.
Subs: Rudiger, Alonso, Jorginho, Abraham, Pedro, Loftus-Cheek, Caballero, Hudson-Odoi, Batshuayi.
Aside from the (admittedly not totally insignificant) fact that this is a London derby, Crystal Palace have very little to play for tonight. They’re not going down, they’re not getting into Europe, they’re just biding their time until next season. All they really have to worry about is not tanking to the extent that bitter rivals Brighton don’t leapfrog them by the end of the campaign. In short, there’s little or no jeopardy for Roy Hodgson’s team this evening.
That’s probably just as well, because they’ve lost their last three matches on the bounce. A spirit-sapping 4-0 defeat at Liverpool, where they became the first team since Opta invented football in 2006 to fail to get a single touch in the opposition box, has been followed by a home defeat to Burnley and a clinical three-goal spanking at Leicester. Champions League hopefuls Chelsea may be rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation of a precious three points, not least because they’ve won their last four matches against Palace.
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