Category: Football (Soccer)

Crystal Palace midfielder on the hype in his early career, ‘shit’ VAR and embarrassment of the 2019 FA Cup final

Chat over. Will Hughes strolls across the car park to get some photographs taken. As it happens, the man emerging from the gym at that very moment is the Crystal Palace midfield-partner whose praises Hughes has just been lavishly exalting.

“Just added about £20m to your fee in that interview,” Hughes shouts at Adam Wharton as they pass. “You can have half,” Wharton retorts. All delivered with a knowing smile, for this is the Palace of Oliver Glasner, where – as Hughes puts it – “there’s egos, but good egos”. No arrogance, none of the blame culture he sees elsewhere. “You watch other teams and hands are in the air, there’s moaning,” he says. “But I honestly don’t see any of that here.”
It’s the week of the FA Cup final and there’s a frisson in the air. But Hughes is happy to talk about anything and everything: the good, the bad, the ridiculous. What the first trophy of his career would mean. How a wispy teenage No 10 turned into one of the Premier League’s toughest, most reliable midfielders. Why VAR is “shit”. Whether he was ever as good as everyone said he was. Why he doesn’t really watch football.

The Crystal Palace manager cut his teeth in the Austrian and German Bundesligas, while a health scare helped form his approach to life

Siegmund Gruber didn’t take long to decide Oliver Glasner was his man. “We were convinced from the moment we met him,” says the chief executive of the Austrian club Lask. “Oliver started his presentation and it was like that scene in Jerry Maguire: ‘You had me at hello.’”

It was the summer of 2015 and the future Crystal Palace manager had been persuaded to leave SV Ried, where he had made more than 500 appearances and been named player of the century before taking over as manager the previous year, for their main rivals. What made things worse was that Lask, after going bankrupt under the previous owners and losing their stadium, had just been promoted from the third division, while Ried had finished mid-table in the Austrian Bundesliga.

Collapse of their league title defence and an early European exit mean Manchester City’s season rests on beating Palace

The measure of Manchester City’s class is that they have a chance of claiming the FA Cup in Saturday’s Wembley showpiece despite a troubled campaign featuring serial injury, an insipid title defence, Champions League playoff stage elimination by Real Madrid and the mid-season departure of the captain, Kyle Walker, on loan.

Oliver Glasner’s in-form Crystal Palace, who have lost two of their past 14 games, are in their way but Pep Guardiola’s garlanded team are favourites, the wounded deposed champions intent on not ending empty-handed for the first time since the Catalan’s opening 2016-17 term.

• Striker puts focus on FA Cup final against Crystal Palace
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Erling Haaland has described Manchester City’s season as “horrific” and “boring” owing to the champions losing so many games, and said that makes winning Saturday’s FA Cup final against Crystal Palace even more vital.

City, the Premier League title winners in the past four seasons, are fourth, 18 points behind the champions, Liverpool, having lost nine times. They were eliminated by Real Madrid in the Champions League playoff stage and by Tottenham in the last 16 of the Carabao Cup.