Alan Pardew hopes Crystal Palace can “have a good season” watching them beat Stoke City 4-1 to claim back-to-back Premier League wins for the first time since December 2015.
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Hughes, meanwhile, will need to engineer a drastic improvement in his defence if Stoke are to avoid falling far short of last season’s ninth-place finish, with his side having picked up just one point from their first five games. “We haven’t got going yet”. We are making silly mistakes and being heavily punished for it. In the last three years we have had three top-10 finishes, and numerous players are still the same.
“We know what we’re about”.
“This is not the start we expected, it’s a case of getting together and what we are doing, the game plan needs to be at a better level”. We need to have a long, hard look at ourselves and come out fighting.
Bowen struggled, however, to explain just why Stoke are such slow starters a day after chairman Peter Coates gave manager Mark Hughes a vote of confidence.
Coates added: “We are disappointed to be where we are”.
Crystal Palace were the latest team to hand the Potters a pasting, and with Pulis’s West Brom up next, fresh off punching four goals past West Ham on Saturday, there is a foreboding sense that things might get worse before they get better. If you are not on it, like we haven’t been in the games we have been beaten, that is what happens. You’d like to think over the three years they know what we can do’.
“The deliveries were great today and they had a bit of fortune when Bojan cleared one off the line and there were another couple of scrappy moments when we could have scored”.
“Hull fans can expect to see the fruits of the club’s belated transfer window trolley dash as Mike Phelan rings the changes for the trip to Stoke”.
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Crystal Palace has picked up some form and they will want to build on their two wins with another as they travel to the Stadium of Light to face Sunderland. He combined well with Wilfried Zaha when the two rotated to switch Townsend to the right wing, and also with left-back Martin Kelly.
