{"id":204001,"date":"2025-11-28T01:41:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T01:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/204001\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T01:41:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T01:41:08","slug":"chelsea-stars-past-and-future-to-the-fore-as-impressive-strasbourg-down-crystal-palace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/204001\/","title":{"rendered":"Chelsea stars past and future to the fore as impressive Strasbourg down Crystal Palace"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s vaguely unsettling watching Strasbourg play football. There\u2019s something of the uncanny valley of this football club that isn\u2019t really a football club any more deploying players that aren\u2019t really its own and with the ultimate goal of the club being the betterment of Chelsea.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not the first or last club to find themselves in this position, but they are one of the best. They are a tremendous amount of fun if you can just swallow down all the nagging thoughts that what you\u2019re watching is in some way hastening the demise of the very concept of sport.<\/p>\n

What Strasbourg do have among their collection of Chelsea<\/strong><\/a> might-bes, has-beens, never-will-bes and possiblys is an enormous amount of talent.<\/p>\n

There is, perhaps inevitably given the real aim of the whole enterprise, an occasional lack of cohesion but when it comes together as it did in frequent beguiling 10-minute clumps during a thoroughly entertaining yet oft baffling 2-1 Europa Conference win over Crystal Palace they are a joy to watch.<\/p>\n

The definitively Chelsea-bound Emanuel Emegha<\/strong><\/a> is particularly eye-catching, at 22 already a senior player and club captain in what is \u2013 again, by inevitable design \u2013 a ridiculously young team. When it all threatened to get away from them in the first half, they called on another Chelsea \u2013 and also Palace \u2013 connection in Ben Chilwell to perform a kind of childminding role and get them back on task.<\/p>\n

That worked tremendously well in the second half as Strasbourg turned on its head a game that appeared to be running away from them towards the end of the first.<\/p>\n

Palace opened the scoring with a fine goal from Tyrick Mitchell after wonderful hold-up play and a clever pass from Jean-Phillippe Mateta. It was Palace\u2019s first real chance, and the goal rattled Strasbourg.<\/p>\n

The second-half fightback sees them sitting pretty in second place with 10 points from their four games. Palace, on the other hand, now need to be slightly careful having slipped towards the 24-team cutline after a second defeat of the group stage. If nothing else, this is a defeat that significantly raises the prospect of Palace having to negotiate the play-off round before the last 16, something that any Premier League team could always do without.<\/p>\n

Palace will also wonder quite how they lost this game, and how they lost the run of it having seemed to take control by half-time<\/p>\n

Top of their list of annoyances will be not one but two failures to take advantage of an open goal offered to them by Strasbourg\u2019s lunatic keeper Mike Penders. We\u2019d heard whispers of his eccentricity, and we were not disappointed.<\/p>\n

He favours a general starting position about 25 yards from his goal and doesn\u2019t appear to let trivialities like almost conceding a humiliating goal faze him one bit. You do find yourself rooting for him, and we desperately hope he has 15 years as Chelsea\u2019s No. 1 in which he never, ever lets convention or humiliation change him.<\/p>\n

Quite how he got away with it here we will never quite know. In the first half Ismaila Sarr contrived to hit the post from dead centre and 30 yards out with Penders on walkabout. In the second half, with the score at 1-1, Adam Wharton thumped the crossbar from closer range with the goal again entirely unguarded.<\/p>\n

What Penders can also do is produce exceptional saves, as he did to deny Yeremy Pino from close range just before Samil El Mourabet tucked home the rebound after Julio Enciso\u2019s free-kick had hit the bar.<\/p>\n

A deeply frustrating night for Palace which leaves them with serious work to do, and a troubling one in other ways. But thanks in no small part to their large Chelsea contingent, Strasbourg also ensured it was an undeniably entertaining one.<\/p>\n

READ NEXT:\u00a0Dyche right with \u2018broken\u2019 Forest claim as woes overcome by \u2018real connection\u2019 and no-brainer changes<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s vaguely unsettling watching Strasbourg play football. There\u2019s something of the uncanny valley of this football club that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204002,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[76],"tags":[2052,5000,18,1322,1323,793,794,19,17,132],"class_list":{"0":"post-204001","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-chelsea","9":"tag-crystal-palace","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-f365-features","12":"tag-f365-says","13":"tag-front-page","14":"tag-home-page","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115624784152634332","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}