Tottenham Hotspur vs Crystal Palace match report: Martin Kelly fires Eagles into sixth round

Even Tottenham Hotspur can still have off days. Even this Spurs team, chasing an unlikely Premier League title, can sometimes misfire, especially against opponents who come to White Hart Lane and defend with as much determination as Crystal Palace showed yesterday afternoon.

Alan Pardew’s side, desperately unfancied before this game, are into the sixth round of the FA Cup and deservedly so. Palace defended deep, worked hard, rode their luck and took their best chance, just as Leicester City did here in the league six weeks ago.

For Tottenham this was a reminder that, while they may be the best team in the country, they do not have the best squad. Manager Mauricio Pochettino has been trying to balance competition on three fronts and so made seven changes from the side who drew 1-1 in Florence in the Europa League on Thursday evening. There were rare starts for Michel Vorm, Nabil Bentaleb and Josh Onomah – and Spurs produced a faltering, disjointed performance.

Stretched Spurs fall to Pardew’s resolute game plan

jack pitt-brooke

at white hart lane

Tottenham Hotspur0

Crystal Palace1

Kelly 45

Pochettino insisted afterwards that his team had not played especially poorly. “We deserved it more, we played better,” he said. “Maybe we didn’t play fantastic, but we had the better chances to win the game. We were a little bit unlucky today.”

That may be true on balance, but only just. Spurs created few real chances, playing with more energy than fluency, more intent than intelligence. They missed the clever direction of Christian Eriksen in the first half, and when he came on at the interval Palace were 1-0 up and camped in their own box. Spurs’ best chances both fell to Dele Alli in the first half: a far-post header that hit Yohan Cabaye on the line, and a shot that struck the far post before rolling agonisingly along the line and hitting the other.

Beyond that there was very little, even in a second half in which Spurs dominated possession but could not break through. Son Heung-min, their best player, tired and barely lasted an hour. Harry Kane was crowded out, and, not for the first time this season, Spurs lacked a second striker on the bench. They did not look like a team which has the resources to compete for three trophies.

Pochettino would not say that Spurs could benefit from the decreased workload, having avoided a quarter-final or a replay. But the importance of their forthcoming games, starting with Fiorentina here on Thursday, does give them more than enough to worry about. “At the moment, in this very tough period, every game that we play is a final,” he said. “We want to win every game. The next game is the most important.”

Spurs will rotate again for the second leg of their Europa League tie, with Erik Lamela due to return from an illness that kept him out of yesterday’s game. Then there is a crucial run of three Premier League games, Swansea at home, West Ham away, Arsenal at home, in which they could hope to take the lead in the Premier League going into the final straight.

For Palace, though, the FA Cup is all they have left this season, and so their manager, Alan Pardew, was delighted to be through to the last eight. Palace have taken three points from their last nine league games, dropping from fifth place down to 13th in the table, but none of that mattered yesterday to their 9,000 noisy travelling fans.

Those supporters were rewarded with a performance full of spirit, even if they lacked finesse. Pardew set up in a compact 4-4-2, with Emmanuel Adebayor and Connor Wickham leading the line up front. Those two were starved of good service, but it did not matter in the end because Palace, unlike Spurs, took their best chance.

In added time at the end of the first half, Wilfried Zaha ran across the edge of the box, dragging defenders towards him. Danny Rose slipped and Zaha passed to Martin Kelly, running forward on the overlap down the right, who beat Vorm with a powerful shot at his near post.

That was the only goal that Palace needed and they disrupted the game effectively after that. Damien Delaney and Scott Dann were impeccable at centre-half, and the fact that Pochettino pointed to how Palace tried to “provoke” Alli only underlines how effective they were in doing so. The return of Yannick Bolasie from the bench after two months out was another bonus, and he would have made it 2-0 in the final minute had an offside Wickham not intervened on the line.

Pardew could revel in the glow of victory afterwards, which he has not been able to do much recently. Minutes after his press conference ended, Palace were rewarded with a sixth-round trip to his former club Reading, where Pardew is not universally loved. But Palace can now very legitimately begin to dream of Wembley, and another FA Cup semi-final, with inevitable memories of 1990.

“The FA Cup gained us more fans in that 1990 run than at any other time,” said Pardew, part of the Palace team 26 years ago. “And they have stayed with us. We’re carrying a lot of fans who have a great history of it, even though we never won it, ironically. So we carry that forward.

“We are trying to build a club, and a great Cup run to the semi-final, or the final, can gain you support, and build you as a club. That is what we have been trying to do.”

At the moment, in this very tough period, every game that we play is like a final

Martin Kelly celebrates scoring Crystal Palace’s winner on the stroke of half-time at White Hart Lane yesterday reuters