Zaha’s contract is up and it seems unlikely he will renew after ten years at the club that seemed like a century as an example of the club.
By Juan Yague.
The final weeks of the season are approaching and the urgency is starting to be noticed. For the national title, for the Champions League positions and for not being relegated. This last section also includes Crystal Palace, which decided a few days ago to fire Patrick Vieira as coach.
The journey of Gallic legend in Selhurst Park has been as bland and boring as any. Last year he led the team to the semi-final of the FA Cup at Wembley, where they lost to Chelsea. But otherwise, the usual for Croydon. Half a table, zero miracles, a hundred predictability. Those are the Eagles. So it’s hard to understand the progression of a coach who seamlessly identified with all of this.
What ambition is there in South London? There are young people with projection like Eze, Olise, Andersen or Guehi. but nothing moreS. wilfred Zaha is out of contract and it seems unlikely he will renew after a decade at the club that seemed like a century. Why stay? To be a legend of a club that aspires to nothing and it is not threatened by anything, it has no stimulus today. Cases like Le Tissier’s died out two decades ago.
Roy Hodgson returns in relief. A 75-year-old war veteran who hardly trained DI Stéfano and Kubala. It is the best representation of a club founded in compliance and zero ambition in an environment of appalling development and competitiveness within the Premier League. An iconoclast who at the Etihad suddenly beat Manchester City two years in a row and remains between fourteenth and ninth place (to give a representative example) twelve consecutive courses.
It is difficult to predict any kind of catharsis in such an entity. The perfect symbolism that the one who does not advance stagnates and therefore deteriorates before the rest. Vieira did what he could in a club that lives in a present that no longer exists and does not respond to a future that already overwhelms and surpasses it. And all this looking to the past. That’s why they re-signed Hodgson at 75 years old.
Source: Goal