Crystal Palace shock champions Chelsea as Wilfried Zaha secures vital win

Something remarkable happened here. At 3.11pm, albeit courtesy of a Chelsea player, Crystal Palace finally scored a league goal. And more significantly in the context of this club’s season as a whole, at just before 5pm when Andre Marriner’s whistle shrilled and the division’s whipping boys, previously pointless and goalless, had hoisted themselves not off the foot, but at least off the mark. “It is the start of the fightback,” offered Wilfried Zaha in the tunnel. The din still reverberating around the stands betrayed new-found belief.

This was a script that no one, least of all Chelsea’s champions, had envisaged being played out in this previously angst-ridden corner of south-east London. Yet for all the visitors’ huff and puff after the interval as they desperately pursued parity, it was a contest Roy Hodgson’s team deserved to claim for their industry alone. Zaha, on his first appearance since the opening day, secured only Palace’s second home league win against these opponents in 27 years with a goal clipped across Thibaut Courtois on the stroke of half-time, just reward for Mamadou Sakho’s dispossession of Willian in midfield and a cleverly slid pass for the makeshift striker to collect.

It was a goal Palace’s zest merited, and a concession that rather summed up Chelsea’s off-colour performance, all indecision and lethargy where Palace snapped and harried. Willian had dawdled on the ball but none of Davide Zappacosta, César Azpilicueta or David Luiz was sharp enough to suffocate the threat posed by the Palace’s talisman, Zaha.

The atmosphere in this arena had been lifted merely at confirmation that the Ivory Coast forward, together with Julián Speroni, was in the starting lineup. The sight of opponents gasping in pursuit of the ball merely raised expectations further. “Our start was poor,” grumbled the Chelsea manager, Antonio Conte. “When you play against Crystal Palace away you have to start with more personality otherwise you allow your opponent to take confidence.”

Given Palace are one of the more generous teams at home in the top-flight, and had been beaten in 11 of their previous 12 league games, that was damning of Chelsea. They had pilfered an equaliser, Tiémoué Bakayoko rising to nod in Cesc Fàbregas’ corner after seven minutes in arrears, but lacked the dynamism of last term in the absence of N’Golo Kanté. Victor Moses became the latest to succumb to hamstring trouble before the break and though Fàbregas struck the bar and Speroni did well to deny Marcos Alonso and Pedro, this was uncharacteristically slack throughout.

“The performance was not up to standard for whatever reason,” bemoaned the captain Gary Cahill before deflecting the most obvious excuse of the disruption caused by the international break. “We have many players who go away, but that’s part and parcel and we need to be livelier. Today it was the basics [that were wrong] and it was unlike us.”

Michy Batshuayi’s stroppy substitution, swearing to the heavens and then flinging his strapping down on the touchline, summed up the fractious mood. This was a second successive league defeat, and that magnificent performance at Atlético Madrid suddenly seems an age away. “But we have to find the will to fight,” added Conte. “This season will be very difficult and, for this reason we have to put 150% in. It’s not enough to put 100% in like last year. We want to try and be competitive in all competitions, but it won’t be easy.” His team now languish nine points off the leaders, Manchester City. A year ago, when they had embarked on that 13-game winning streak, the gap was three at this point.

Perhaps they had been shocked by Palace’s urgent opening, a feverish start which yielded that elusive first goal of the season. James McArthur had liberated Andros Townsend to the byline, with the winger pulling a cross back for Yohan Cabaye to collect on the run. David Luiz’s touch propelled the loose ball back on to the Frenchman who, almost inadvertently, poked it goalwards, but it took a deflection off Azpilicueta on the edge of the six-yard box to take it beyond the grasp of Courtois.

It had been 731 minutes, a drought stretching back to the final game of last season, since staff and supporters of the club last celebrated a league goal. All those dreadful records had been accumulating ever since as three managers tried and failed to find a way through, though by the end here, that was all forgotten.

Hodgson’s tactics, with Townsend and Zaha a skilful and rapid partnership and midfielders plugging gaps all over the pitch, had proved to be a masterstroke, the plan hatched over the two-week international break. They might have added further rewards before the end, with Patrick van Aanholt squirting a hurried shot wide of a gaping goal after Courtois could only palm out Townsend’s attempt, but it mattered not. They are off the mark and at the final whistle, life at the bottom of the league can never have been sweeter.

“You forget how stressful those last minutes of a football match are, so it’s quite nice to be sitting here relaxed knowing Chelsea can’t score now,” added Hodgson. “I’m off to Southampton to watch [next Saturday’s opponents] Newcastle tomorrow, so my wife, who is accompanying me, can’t say I don’t give her a day out …”