Manchester United grab a late winner to rob Crystal Palace of a point. Mathieu Flamini handed his first start of the season. Rooney still waiting to equal Sir Bobby Charlton’s club record.
Palace started the match 13 minutes after United did only having 14 touches in the opening 13 minutes of the game. Slowly palace grew into the game but the consistently miss placed passes gifting United the ball. Palace though looked more dangerous on the attack however in typical palace fashion nothing happened once the ball was within 25 Yards of de Gea’s goal.
The game was rather flat and the poor passing of palace only grew everyone’s frustration. Marcos Rojo was lucky to still be on the pitch after a two-footed tackle on Zaha only put his name on the yellow card. What seems like every game we gave away a silly foul at the dying moments of the first half. Which gave United the lead with a scrappy finish from the £100 million man Paul Pogba.
The second half was no different to the first poor passing and very little movement. In a moment of brilliance from the Palace defence Joel Ward shimmied his way through from the left to pass it to Damien Delaney to produce a world class flick though for Palace’s 2nd top goal scorer James McArthur to simply poke home.
This brought the game back level and Palace seemed a much stronger side after the goal although the passing in our own half was shocking. Wayne Hennessey was on top form pulling out top saves to keep palace in the game.
With the game going back and forth Alan decided to freshen up the team. He subbed Ezekiel Fryers for Lee Chung-yong then a short while after he subbed the goal scorer McArthur for Fraizer Campbell seconds later Pogba pings a ball to Zlatan Ibrahimovic and he scores to make it 2-1 to United in the final moments of the game. Why would you try and get the winner against Manchester United and risk a point when you are in a relegation battle I will never know.
Alan Pardew said after the game “We’re scoring goals that’s in important…” I agree with Alan however scoring less goals than the opposition will cause us problems thus we sit 16th with 15 points in the middle of December. Only having won 6 games in the whole of 2016. Something must change.
Man of The Match – Paul Pogba
Stats:
Possession: 39% - 61%
Shots: 6-16
Shots on Target: 3-6
Corners: 1-8
Source: DSG
