- Arsenal v Crystal Palace – It’s the League Cup on Tuesday
- Poor Tottenham: posh stadium, but not the results to go with it
- Most wins, fewest defeats, lowest goals against, top of the league…
By Tony Attwood
Definitely missing for the Palace league cup match to be played tomorrow are Cristhian Mosquera Ibarguen, Ben White, Kai Havertz (who seems to have been on the edge of returning for ages but never quite makes it), and Max Downman who looks like being out for a while. Gabriel dos Santos Magalhaes is given a 25% chance of playing.
Palace, however, made the error of having African players in the team in a year when there is an African Cup of Nations going on. This means they are without Ismalia Sarr and Daniel Munoz who are now far overseas and out of reach. Ah well, it was Palace’s choice.
The games between the two clubs have not been as regular as with many other teams as Palace have often sauntered around the lower leagues, and indeed old timers like me can actually remember them being in Division Three (South). But we have managed to play them from time to time and 36 of those games have been won by Arsenal. Which is 61% of all the games played. Of the rest 17 have been drawn and six have been won by Palace.
Palace had a great run against Arsenal from October 2018 up to April 2022, during which time in eight Premier League matches they won two, drew five and lost just once. But since August 2022, across seven league games and one League Cup match, it has been seven Arsenal wins to one draw, with no Palace victories. The goal tally across these eight games has been 23 goals to Arsenal and six to Palace. Which does appear to make things a bit lopsided.
Which prompts a return look at the league position of the two clubs: Arsenal have scored 31 league goals this season, while Palace have scored 21. Which doesn’t sound too enormous a gap were it not for the fact that Palace have conceded 19 league goals to Arsenal’s ten.
Added together, this gives Arsenal a goal difference that is 19 goals more positive than that of Palace (21 to 2 in fact). The one thing that offers Palace some hope is the fact that they are the seventh-best team in terms of scoring away goals. They have knocked in 12, away from home, which is one more than Arsenal have. Except of course, that latter fact doesn’t really mean much here since Arsenal are at home.
The fact is for Palace, all attention has moved to the celebration of the victory which gave them the FA Cup last season, and obviously, for that they deserve fulsome congratulations. But although they are fifth in the Premier League at the moment the fact is that in the twelve seasons since they won promotion from the Championship, they have never finished in the league above 10th, and tenth itself was only achieved twice.
But they are indeed fifth at the moment, and of course they won the FA Cup last season, but these are unusual times for Palace. That is not to say that they can’t hold on to this new higher status, and maybe have another bash at getting into the Europa League next season (if their ownership issues can be sorted out), but their position of being tenth in the Uefa Conference League suggests that this is possibly an appropriate level for them.
The top eight go straight into the next round without a play-off, and Palace are with five teams who are two points off that place. But as a London team, we wish them well, except for when they play Arsenal. (This comment does not hwoever apply to Tottenham Ho.)
