Manchester City Cs Crystal Palace Premier League Football Match Score 2023
Manchester City with a 62.5% chance of winning on Saturday, according to our pre-match prediction. A win would see them cut the gap to Arsenal at the top of the league to two points. Crystal Palace set to extend their winless run to 10 Premier League games – could they get dragged into a relegation scuffle? The 1-0 defeat at Aston Villa continued Palace’s slide towards an unexpected relegation battle as they still await their first three-point haul of 2023. The 2-0 win at Bournemouth on New Year’s Eve is their only victory since the season resumed following the World Cup.
With Manchester City up next, live on Sky Sports – followed by Brighton and Arsenal – life is unlikely to get easier any time soon.
Jedinak joined the Eagles on a free transfer from Turkish side Gençlerbirliği and was scouted by then-manager Dougie Freedman and first-team coach Tony Popovic, a fellow Australian. In his time with Palace, he became a cult hero and club captain as he skippered the side back to the Premier League via the Play-Off Final of 2012/13 at Wembley.
He starred for the Eagles during the following four seasons in the top-flight, showing his courage, leadership and class in the central ground. He skippered the team to the 2016 FA Cup final before joining Aston Villa later that summer after five years at Selhurst Park. During his career, he played against a host of great City players. Today, he selects ‘My Nightmare XI’ – those who he was most impressed with during his battles with the sky blues. I’m trying to think of who my team-mates would least want to be face so I’m going for Pablo Zabaleta, who was a really fine right-back.
He was a long-serving player for the club, too, I know so I will go with him. He never shirked anything defensively. Crystal Palace are on the longest current winless run in the Premier League, drawing five and losing four of their past nine games, failing to score on five occasions in that run. They had gone 196 minutes without a shot on target – the last coming in the 76th minute against Brentford on February 18. What didn’t help Palace’s cause at Villa was the dismissal of Cheick Doucoure, who was booked twice in six second-half minutes.
Doucoure collected his first yellow card for a 57th-minute challenge that ended Boubacar Kamara’s afternoon, and five minutes later he left Kamara’s replacement Calum Chambers in a heap to earn an early shower.
Despite the 16 points difference between these two in the Premier League table, the market has this as an even game. That may sway some to seeing the 7/4 with Sky Bet for a Brentford win looking particularly attractive but
Everton are much more than relegation fodder under Sean Dyche. They were superb at Nottingham Forest last weekend, posing a threat going forward and offering little for Forest to work with. It was just unfortunate they bumped into a red-hot Brennan Johnson. If you’re looking for me to create a team here, I’ll go with Joleon as I know he played alongside Vincent to great effect in central defence. They were a good partnership.
Joleon was a very good centre-half in his own right too, very reliable and very capable. He was also left footed so he’d compliment Vincent in that respect too. Crystal Palace have caused Manchester City some serious problems of late. The Eagles took four points off them across their league fixtures in 2021-22 – winning 2-0 at the Etihad before holding the Cityzens to a 0-0 draw at home – and they were 45 minutes away from rocking the boat once again earlier in the season.
In fact, such has been Palace’s resilience against City that they’ve avoided defeat in five of their 13 Premier League meetings with Pep Guardiola’s Man City; only Liverpool (nine), Tottenham Hotspur (eight) and Man Utd (seven) have avoided defeat more often against City than the Eagles since Pep joined.
That said, it’s away from home where Crystal Palace have enjoyed the most success against City. The Eagles are winless in their last seven English Premier League home games Pep’s side (D2 L5) in a run going back to a 2-1 win in April 2015. They’ve failed to score in five of these seven games, including each of the last three.
And a lack of potency in attack has been the Eagles’ biggest weakness this season. Patrick Vieira’s side have generated the second-lowest expected goals total (23.0) in the entire division so far, with only bottom-placed Bournemouth (21.9) creating lower-quality chances. A lack of creativity up front has resulted in just two goals in their last six home league games.
Given Manchester City have the best defensive record in the league – their expected goals against of 21.8 is the lowest of all sides – chances will be at a premium for the home side. There’s a chance that Pep will rotate (when does he not?) with the second leg of their Champions League tie against RB Leipzig coming the following midweek. City would join Chelsea in the quarter-finals if they were to get past the Bundesliga side.
Manchester City made a nightmare start to the reverse fixture last August. They found themselves 2-0 down just 21 minutes into the game, with John Stones inadvertently turning an Eberechi Eze free-kick into his own goal before Joachim Andersen headed in from a corner. It was the earliest City had been two behind at home in the Premier League since December 2010 against Everton (2-0 down after 19 mins).
