August 13 2017

Palace attack the Huddersfield goal with Rubens Loftus-Cheek (No 8) putting in a valuable shift.

It was a dismal start to the new season when Palace lost their first home league game 0-3, Jamesey is sad to say.

Take a club who have re-entered the top tier after 45 years, only just scraped into promotion through the play-offs and were the bookmakers' red hot favourites for relegation.

Yes, Huddersfield Town were Palace's first opponents at Selhurst in the 2017-18 Stacksomoulah League (August 12).

However, things did not go according to expectations when the Terriers had their own ideas of how the game would be played.

The atmosphere was buoyant at the start on a warm August afternoon, as Eagles supporters gathered for another campaign, grateful to be in the top tier at all (thanks to the intervention of Sam Allardyce).

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Indeed August is always a reasonably happy time for football fans - however bad things look, there’s always loads of time to put it all right.

It didn't, however, take long for things to start going wrong.

New boss, Frank de Boer, dapperly attired at the dugout, started with three of his new acquisitions - Jairo Riedewald, Timothy Fosu-Mensah and Rubens Loftus-Cheek.

The Terriers tore into their opponents from the kick-off, quite robustly on occasion, but frankly they looked much the better side with stout defending and fast, clever movement forward, with Steve Mounie looking particularly dangerous.

On 23 minutes a Terriers cross was nodded on and in the resulting goalmouth melee, Joel Ward stabbed the ball into his own net.

Ah well, anyone can make a mistake but there was no mistake a couple of minutes later when an almost unmarked Mounie nodded in a second goal for Huddersfield.

In my report on our friendly against Schalke last week I did mention the fact the Palace team seemed confused and disjointed and unsure of their respective roles. This game initially revealed very much the mixture as before.

The players left the field to a salvo of booing at half-time on the first occasion since the shocking display against Sunderland in February.

The only consolation was to hear that Chelsea were three down against Burnley. They, however, did eventually manage to score two in the second half, two more than the Eagles could manage.

To be fair Palace looked much improved in the second period when both Wilfried Zaha and Christian Benteke were unlucky not to score with efforts that on another day might easily have gone in.

But on this day, it was not to be.

Fosu-Mensah prevented the Terriers from a third netting with a terrific last-ditch tackle but once again Mounie popped up on the 78th minute with a bullet of a shot to make it 0-3.

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After one game, league positions are quite meaningless but it is depressing to see the table showing Crystal Palace as the bottom club with zero points and the worst goal difference.

This supporter was hoping that maybe we could at least have one season without the spectre of relegation looming in the background. Some find a relegation battle more stimulating than mid-table steadiness. There again some people like being hit over the head with a sockful of sand!

Ian Wright, "punditting" on MOTD, declared that the Eagles were awful and it reminded him of the "old days". He was not presumably referring to the era many years ago when he was wearing red-and-blue himself?

With a challenging trip to Liverpool next week, it will be interesting to see whether the manager changes tactics and formation to something the team is more comfortable with, or sticks to his guns come hell or high water.

Mr de Boer's spell at Inter-Milan lasted a mere 85 days last year. Will history repeat itself in the far more humble precinct of Selhurst Park and another "Allardyce" have to be recruited?

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