This means if Palace finished in our current position, we would bypass the play-off round and go straight into a two-legged tie for a place in the quarter finals.<\/p>\n
As a guide, in last season\u2019s table the side finishing eighth ended up with 11 points. Seven points was enough to secure 24th in the table \u2013 the final play-off spot.<\/p>\n
What else happened on Thursday night?<\/strong><\/p>\n Two of Palace\u2019s future opponents met on the first night of action with AEK Larnaca hosting Dutch side AZ Alkmaar.<\/p>\n And it was the Cypriots who made a flying start with a 4-0 win, AZ playing the vast majority of the tie with ten men after Alexandre Penetra\u2019s red card after only two minutes.<\/p>\n In addition to Kyiv-Palace, there was second opening round meeting between a British and Ukrainian club with Scottish Cup winners Aberdeen hosting Shakhtar Donetsk. After falling behind to an early penalty, the visitors eventually edged a five-goal thriller to claim the win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This means if Palace finished in our current position, we would bypass the play-off round and go straight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[2000,299,5187],"class_list":{"0":"post-470991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-european"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115310073309445347","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}