SELHURST PARK – For new Crystal Palace manager Pierre Sage, defeat to Manchester City must have felt a bit like waiting for a dental extraction. A little discomfort for now. The worst may be yet to come.
Many will write off Palace if Daniel Munoz, Ismaila Sarr and Jean-Philippe Mateta – scorers of 60 per cent of last season’s league goals – are sold before Tuesday’s deadline. The doom still feels a little overblown.
The new-season buzz was killed by a buzz-cut. A newly-trimmed Erling Haaland and the magical feet of Rayan Cherki showed why Sage, the latter’s old Lyon coach, considers him “God”. The cameo from £86m debutant Ayyoub Bouaddi suggested City have got their belated business right. Perhaps there is method in Palace’s madness too.
Surging down the right, Anan Khalaili looked a ready-made Munoz replacement. He is almost a decade younger than the Colombian. Mateta, too, will be 30 next year.
Like the first swallows of summer, the surest sign of the approaching August deadline is a late Mateta melodrama. Last week, it was the insistence that the final 12 months of his contract were invalid. That appeal was rejected.
On the evening of the first home game, it was a hamstring injury to keep him out for four weeks. In the New Year he will be free to talk to other clubs and makes no bones of the fact he does not want to be here. An Aston Villa transfer now looks unlikely with Unai Emery turning instead to Nicolas Jackson.
Even with Mateta, Palace were last season’s great underperformers when it came to expected goals (xG). The hunt for a more clinical finisher has once again left them scrambling around in the final days of the window, though with less of the chaos that ensued when Sage’s predecessor Oliver Glasner declared he had been “abandoned” by the board.
Those working with Sage have hailed his “totally different” and calm mentality. The decision to offload another attacker in Brennan Johnson was accepted because it was a move that had not worked out for all parties.
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Another centre-back and defensive midfielder are the other priorities. There is competition from Chelsea for Lamine Camara and they still need to agree a deal with Roma to bring in Morocco international Neil Yoni El Aynaoui. Joel Ordonez’s arrival from Club Brugge is now in doubt due to a metatarsal injury. In short, the summer can still be salvaged, albeit Palace have stayed true to form by leaving it all too late.
It is just as well there are already the shoots of promise in the wreckage of Glasner’s glory years, from Yeremy Pino’s free-kick to the way Daichi Kamada disrupted City’s midfield in the first half.
Adam Wharton sprayed passes left and right and made a mockery of Thomas Tuchel’s World Cup snub. And in a summer when City were among his suitors, the deal Palace determined would never happen may just be the most important one of all.