V BIG SAM’S SHAKING ALL OVER
CRYSTAL PALACE HULL CITY Must-win nervy clash will put Palace through wringer Not got a Clu why I’m not scoring
SAM ALLARDYCE admits Crystal Palace’s failure to secure their Premier League safety is frustrating his plans for next season.
The Eagles looked to have done the business with five games to spare when they beat Liverpool 2-1 three weeks ago.
But then a dismal run of three defeats has opened t he door to Swansea and today’s opponents Hull, and dragged Big Sam’s boys right back into the mire.
So instead of building for the future, Palace must concentrate on today’s nervy, tense, must-win affair at Selhurst Park.
The Palace boss said: “We’d have liked to have secured our Premier League place by now.
“At the moment, though, it’s about making sure you think of only one thing – cut everything else off and focus on this game. Particularly the players.
“And our job as a backroom staff is to cover all angles, spending long periods of time t alking about s election processes, s ystems, t he opposition.”
Allardyce is adamant Palace would have been safe a week ot two ago had they not been crippled by injuries. He added: “If we’d kept all our players fit everybody would have found it difficult to stop us, so sadly that has disrupted us a bit.
“Maybe there was a bit of a switch-off after Liverpool as well and that’s how quickly the game changes – everything looks rosy then all of a sudden we’re very nervous again. “So we have got ourselves in this position and we have to get ourselves out of it.
“Everyone gets injuries and we have to deal with them better than we have done.”
If Allardyce keeps Palace up then, personally, it will complete a remarkable year in which he also kept Sunderland in the Premier League and took and lost the England job.
He said: “The last season is a great book – it will be about 10 chapters on its own.
“Unfortunately there are a lot of disclosures under confidentiality that would make the book a best-seller but that won’t be able to be aired.
“Getting back into football after England was the main aim and the Premier League is where I have been for years now.
“It helped me get over the disappointment of the England time.” SAM CLUCAS has shown via his exhaustive displays this season that he is willing to go the extra mile to preserve Hull’s Premier League status.
The Tigers midfielder is the leading English player in the top flight when it comes to ground covered this season, coming in close to 250 miles across his 35 appearances, a distance bettered only by Swansea’s Gylfi Sigurdsson and Christian Eriksen, of Tottenham.
But one area the athletic 26-year-old does confess to coming up short is goalscoring, and he has vowed to chip in with a goal before the final curtain comes down this season.
Clucas has scored just twice in the league this season – although one of those strikes was the goal-of-the-month contender in April’s victory over Watford.
Disappointed
And Marco Silva’s team will need to find the net with at least one victory required against Crystal Palace or Tottenham to pull off a relegation escape.
“I’ve wanted to improve my goalscoring this season and two goals isn’t really good enough for me, so I will be aiming for another couple before the end of the season to help keep us in this division,” said Clucas ahead of today’s lunchtime encounter at Selhust Park.
“Scoring goals is something I have done everywhere I have been so I have been disappointed with the number I have scored. Two is just not enough.”
It has been Clucas, a £1.3million snip from Chesterfield two years ago, and Harry Maguire, £2.5m from Sheffield United, that have embodied Hull’s fighting spirit.
And Clucas has warned not to underestimate them.
“We’ve had character from the start – going in with 12 fit players all the pundits said we were guaranteed to go down,” Clucas added.