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Something struck me when reading one of Ezy's posts below. He was being pessimistic and made a comment about the high likelihood of us ending with around 30% possession tonight again. In my head I had been considering that Palace were a counter attacking side so I went to look at their own stats.

In short Palace have 'won' the possession stats in their last 5 games. They only tend to concede possession to the biggest sides like Arsenal, City and Chelsea.

Us on the other hand we (as Ezy rightly pointed out) generally have significantly less of the ball than our opponents this season. In each of Franks league wins our possession has ranged from as 'high' as 42% against Leeds to as low as 22% v Chelsea, ending on average around the 35% mark.

As we saw against Watford (52%) we struggle to break teams down when we have the ball, and our record this season is woeful when we end up with a lot of the ball. Lost to Burnley (A) Villa (H) Brighton (H) and Watford (H) when possession was 50/50. And also lost to Brentford (A) and Norwich (A) when we had about 60% possession each time.

So it's actually good that Palace are likely to have more of the ball tonight. If they were a side that was likely to let us have the ball we'd really need to try and do something we've failed to do all season which is win dominantly. At least now the odds will be in our favour.

UTFT!