Injury problems for Palace at centre-back ahead of Man City match

Crystal Palace ground out a scarcely deserved 1-0 win over Newcastle United on Saturday in a match marred by injuries to centre-halves on either side.

It is fair to say that neither club will be featuring too prominently in Fantasy managers’ thoughts over the coming week, given that they play only once in Double Gameweek 35 and, in Palace’s case, face some tricky fixtures between now and the end of April.

With the Eagles taking on Manchester City and Arsenal in the coming fortnight, however, the fact that they may be sending out a patched-up defence against two of the “big six” will be of keen interest to FPL bosses.

Newcastle United 0-1 Crystal Palace

• Goal: Luka Milivojevic (£6.4m)
• Assist: Wilfried Zaha (£6.9m)

Roy Hodgson said James Tomkins’ (£4.3m) groin strain doesn’t “look very good”, a week before the Eagles entertain title-chasing Manchester City at Selhurst Park.

Mamadou Sakho (£4.9m) is currently sidelined with a knee problem and Palace lost their second senior centre-half to injury at St. James’ Park on Saturday, with Tomkins limping out of the game on 72 minutes.

Speaking in his post-match press conference, Hodgson said:

He’s obviously damaged something in his groin area but I don’t know what it is. We’ll have to scan that but it didn’t look very good.

If it isn’t good and he’s going to miss games it’ll be a massive, massive blow for us because we’re already missing Sakho for the last five or six games, and Tomkins and Sakho have played a large part in us being where we are today.

If the prognosis is as bad as feared, then Palace’s line-up against the Citizens will be the first not to feature at least one of Tomkins or Sakho in the Premier League this season.

Scott Dann (£4.4m) and Martin Kelly (£3.9m) will likely get the nod in their absence and, while the pair have generally performed ably when rotating alongside Tomkins in recent weeks, theirs is an untested partnership: we have to go back almost four years for the last time Kelly and Dann started a match together at centre-half in the league, although Kelly has played a large chunk of his games for Palace at full-back.

The likes of Sergio Aguero (£11.8m) – if fit – and Alexandre Lacazette (£9.4m) may well be up against this centre-half pairing in Gameweeks 34 and 35, should Tomkins be ruled out.

Palace will still be able to call on the excellent Aaron Wan-Bissaka (£4.5m), of course, and the England under-21 international had another solid game at right-back on Saturday, picking up a bonus point to go with his clean sheet.

Newcastle also lost a key defender to injury but with understudies Paul Dummett (£4.4m), Federico Fernandez (£4.4m) and Ciaran Clark (£4.5m) to call on, the likely extended absence of Florian Lejeune (£4.4m) may not be quite so keenly felt.

Lejeune was stretchered off after 64 minutes of Saturday’s game, with Rafael Benitez saying after full-time:

It seems bad. It’s the other knee [to what he injured earlier in the season] but it seems bad. We have to wait and see what the doctor says tomorrow. He felt a click in his knee, so that is bad news normally.

The Magpies are up against in-form Jamie Vardy (£9.1m) and Leicester City on Friday night and are one of two clubs that Southampton face in Double Gameweek 35.

Palace’s latest away win – their seventh of the season – was a smash-and-grab job, as they managed to claim all three points despite registering just three attempts on goal: no side has won a Premier League game this season with fewer shots.

The goal came from a predictable source, with Wilfried Zaha (£6.9m) drawing a foul in the Newcastle box and Luka Milivojevic (£6.4m) confidently dispatching the subsequent spot-kick.

Milivojevic has scored ten of the 11 penalties he has taken this season and Zaha has been fouled for six of them, underlining just how important the Ivory Coast international is to Milivojevic’s appeal as a Fantasy asset and how even deadlier that combination could potentially be next season when VAR is introduced (should the increase in spot-kick awards at the 2018 World Cup be any gauge).

“Out of position” defender Jeffrey Schlupp (£4.5m) went close with the only other two recorded attempts that Palace had, although Tomkins had an effort correctly ruled out for offside in the first half.

FPL forwards Zaha and Michy Batshuayi (£6.5m) failed to register a single shot between them but Zaha was effectively the creator of all three of Palace’s goal attempts.

Salomon Rondon (£6.0m) also had a goal chalked off by a spot-on assistant referee’s flag and it was a frustrating afternoon for the Venezuelan striker and his owners, with Rondon registering more penalty box touches and shots than anyone on show but ultimately blanking for just the second time in six home fixtures.

The on-loan West Brom striker nodded the best of his chances over from a DeAndre Yedlin (£4.5m) cross and tested Vicente Guiata (£4.2m) with a low shot soon after.

Rondon, Miguel Almiron (£6.0m), Ayoze Perez (£6.1m) and Matt Ritchie (£5.8m) registered 12 shots on goal between them and there were plenty of encouraging signs in an attacking sense but with several other clubs having an easier run-in and a “double” in Gameweek 35 to go with it, there will be few takers in Newcastle’s assets in the last month of the season.

Leicester can expect a tougher test in Gameweek 34 than they got from Huddersfield on Saturday, though, with Newcastle not having conceded more than two goals in a game in the last 14 Gameweeks and restricting Palace to just the odd counter-attack at the weekend.

The Eagles’ own underlying defensive statistics make for encouraging reading for owners of City and Arsenal assets going into Gameweeks 34 and 35: when Premier League clubs are filtered by their last six matches, Palace sit in the bottom five for overall attempts on goal, shots in the box, efforts on target and headed opportunities conceded.

They do, at least, rank favourably for fewest “big chances” conceded in that time.

Palace’s vulnerability in the air was again apparent, with Rondon a handful and Lejeune nodding another presentable opportunity straight at Guaita in the second half.

Benitez’s assessment of the match was as follows:

It’s a game we can’t believe we lost. Yes, we know they are dangerous on the counter, but with the chances we had and the control we had, we made too many mistakes in the last minutes. 

We had enough chances to win the game, but for sure not to lose the game.

I think we were attacking, creating chances, controlling the game. Then, we made a mistake, and after that, made two or three more mistakes because we were playing in a rush, without staying calm.”

We had four players there [for the penalty]. We were talking about Zaha, we were watching clips, and we made a big mistake. And after that, still we were making mistakes instead of staying calm and trying to manage the situation.

Hodgson shared his own thoughts on proceedings, saying:

We dealt with the attacking threat that Newcastle most certainly have; they’re very good at crossing the ball, getting bodies in the box and competing for the ball. I thought it was a sterling effort from our back four and our goalkeeper.

Our midfield players helped us out as well to make sure we kept a clean sheet and on the counter-attack, or even from the start of the game – not on the counter-attack – we looked threatening and like we might score the goal.

Luckily for us, Wilf Zaha came to the fore and did what he does so well, dribbling past people in the penalty area and provoking the foul which gives Milivojevic – who has been quite exceptional taking penalties – to give us the goal that we needed for victory.

The Palace boss also revealed why Max Meyer (£5.5m) was missing from the match-day squad:

Sick. He didn’t intend to miss out. He travelled with us last night and was on the bench.

Max Meyer was very much in my thoughts to play a serious part in the game because Schlupp’s played a lot of games recently and Townsend is playing with a damaged hand so I had Max very much in my thoughts as someone to put on but I got the message this morning that he’d woken up with a fever and a virus.

He was feeling weak and unable to play so we sent him home. In fact, we sent him home on an earlier train.

Newcastle United XI (3-4-2-1): Dubravka; Schar, Lascelles, Lejeune (Dummett 65′); Yedlin, Ki (Shelvey 76′), Hayden, Ritchie (Atsu 90′); Perez, Almiron; Rondon.

Crystal Palace XI (4-4-1-1): Guaita; Wan-Bissaka, Tomkins (Dann 73′), Kelly, Van Aanholt; Townsend (Kouyate 85′), Milivojevic, McArthur, Schlupp; Zaha; Batshuayi (Benteke 65′).