Crystal Palace may come to rue this as the moment their bid for Premier League survival stalled. The game was deep into stoppage time at the end when Charlie Daniels was penalised for tripping Wilfried Zaha, the referee awarding his second spot-kick of the game, with Christian Benteke wresting the ball from his team-mates and placing it on the spot while Bournemouth players protested the original decision. The striker, Palace’s record signing, was without a goal since May. He clearly sensed his time had come.
Plenty of his team-mates seemed unsure. Luka Milivojevic, the team’s regular penalty-taker, had initially grabbed the ball but Benteke was having none of it. Scott Dann and James Tomkins both appeared to query why the side would swap spot-kick duties mid-match, even if the former later insisted he had been oblivious to the switch. Zaha, never one to hide his emotions, seemed perplexed. Given the buildup, and the Belgian’s fragile form, there was a certain inevitability as to what ensued. The shot was scuffed and pushed away by Asmir Begovic. The final whistle, slicing through the locals’ disappointment moments later, confirmed Palace had slipped back to the foot of the division.
It was the kind of harebrained thinking, and horribly weak attempt, that can see teams relegated. Benteke has now missed three of his five penalties for the club and departed with boos from the home support ringing in his ears. Roy Hodgson ended up speaking, amicably enough, to a fan at the front of the main stand. “It wasn’t an altercation, the guy was only asking why Benteke had been told to take the penalty,” he explained. “I was telling him he hadn’t. Benteke got hold of the ball. It was a unilateral decision. No one on our team was able to wrest the ball from him. We, the management, don’t expect players to change those decisions. We tried to shout out our instructions. They obviously didn’t reach the penalty spot.
“The reason he was booed off was because the fans, having seen us swarm around their penalty area, thought we’d won it when the referee pointed to the spot. When the guy misses it, he has to accept he’ll be booed off the field. He’s been told already [that he won’t be taking the next penalty]. After missing the one which has deprived us of two valuable points, I can’t imagine him rushing to pick up the ball next time. He’s stunned, shocked, disappointed.” It should be noted that Bournemouth vehemently disputed the penalty award, insisting Daniels had played the ball. They felt justice had been done.
The irony is that, up to that point, this had been Benteke’s most effective performance of the campaign, though quite how he recovers some poise in time for Tuesday’s visit of Watford remains to be seen. Palace had missed him for seven weeks, their team denied a focal point while he recovered from knee ligament damage sustained in September. Now he is back but diminished, his confidence fractured. Belief must be rebuilt amid a cluttered schedule.
He could do well to look at his opposite number, Jermain Defoe, and the emphatic manner in which he emerged from his own relatively wretched sequence of one goal in 13 games to plunder twice. This was actually a tale of two strikers, not least because Defoe’s second goal, thumped home in first-half stoppage time, almost defied belief in its accuracy and execution. A hopeful punt forward by Lewis Cook liberated Defoe beyond Dann, though there still seemed little danger with the angle unkind on the right of the box. Yet the striker’s volleyed finish arced gloriously over Julián Speroni and nestled in the far corner, his matter-of-fact celebration betraying the confidence of a player whose belief is omnipresent.
That was his 201st league goal, and ninth in 10 appearances against Palace, with his double century having been brought up early on courtesy of a corner routine perfected on the training ground. Andrew Surman rolled the ball in to Junior Stanislas, darting forward almost unnoticed from the near-post, with the midfielder able to collect again and square a pass to the penalty spot. There loitered Defoe, unmarked with Josh King having slyly pulled back the striker’s marker, Jeffrey Schlupp, to side‑foot accurately into the corner.
For a while, Palace had quivered in arrears, but at least there is fight in their ranks these days. Their rally just before the break had briefly earned them a lead. First Milivojevic slammed home his penalty after Begovic’s trip on Zaha – the forward dragged his leg and was clipped by the on-rushing goalkeeper – before Dann prodded into an empty net from Yohan Cabaye’s fine centre. Both goals had owed much to Benteke’s contribution though, in the end, that had been forgotten.
“If you miss penalties at home,” added Hodgson, “then you’ve only got yourself to blame.”
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