No Silva bullet for Hull as blunder saves Big Sam
THERE will come a time when Marco Silva digs out the footage of the game that relegated Hull City and realise there was only so much he could do.
The evidence is right there, three minutes into this match. The ball was sitting up, ready to be launched to a distant postcode when Andrea Ranocchia, his centre half, took a big old swing. Missed it, not even a glance; air and nothing else.
That was the moment, the time of realisation. When an Italian international with 21 caps cannot co-ordinate foot to ball for the purpose of a hoofed clearance, it’s time to pack up. Do not pass go, do not collect £100million.
Some miracles simply aren’t meant to be granted, some causes are meant to stay lost.
And so it came to pass that Wilfried Zaha went through on goal and Crystal Palace were quarter of the way to the 4-0 hammering that saved one team and relegated another.
Silva, for his part, could only look to the heavens. He did it throughout this game as he has throughout his four months at the club, but here he got only static.
The Portuguese has shaken up Hull since his arrival in January after the sacking of Mike Phelan and has done more than most expected was possible but ultimately he could not save them.
The real damage, of course, was done in the summer, when the club followed promotion from the Championship by making a catastrophic mess of pre-season. They lost Steve Bruce and barely had enough players for a five-a-side team in August, and Silva didn’t waste any time after this game in highlighting the chaos he found on his first day.
But that is not to say Silva is blameless. They have been brilliant in home games on his watch — 19 points from a possible 24 — but their record on the road since he took over has been abysmal, the worst in the league at two points from 27 after this defeat. That falls on him as much as the squad and the club’s bumbling ownership.
But he will surely re- emerge as a Premier League manager soon enough, while Hull return to the Championship after r one season, which is s music to the ears of f Swansea City fans and d those of Crystal Palace.
To that end, Sam Allardyce has enjoyed a degree of vindication n at the end of a seasonn that saw his bleakestt moment. There were times after his arrival in December that he looked to have lost his enthusiasm, the sparkle in his eyes greyed out by the debacle of his England exit.
But he has pulled it off, keeping Palace up and therefore preserving his admirable record of never having been relegated from the Premier League. Not quite a redemption, as what he gained couldn’t possibly match what he lost, but an impressive achievement nonetheless.
It certainly wasn’t a feat that could be taken for granted in light of three straight defeats, with Palace failing to score in all of them. But it was Allardyce’s good fortune that he only needed to draw against a Hull team that looked incapable of the most basic exercises.
The clearest, most damning illustration of the point came with Ranocchia’s howler on three minutes, when Andros Townsend looped a ball of no great threat down the left. Ranocchia fluffed the clearance, Zaha sauntered through and rolled his shot under Eldin Jakupovic.
Allardyce was laughing as he danced a touchline jig. Silva now needed two goals for the win, which is something Hull had not managed in an away league fixture since August.
That gave the mission the feeling of a fruitless pursuit and indeed it was — their closest effort came when Oumar Niasse retrieved a dead ball from behind the goal and promptly walloped it into the side-netting when attempting to give it to a team-mate to take the corner. A dose of calamity to go with the suffering.
They were 2-0 down on 34 minutes, undone again by a sleepy backline. Jason Puncheon’s corner to the near post was well hit, but Hull left Christian Benteke largely unattended to run across goal and meet it. It was his 15th goal of the season and his seventh from a header — it cannot, surely, have come as a surprise to Hull that he is rather good at them.
A combination of injury and anger saw Silva substitute three of his defence before the 50th minute but it felt like changing sails on a yacht holed beneath the waterline. And it was about as effective.
They were 3-0 down on 85 minutes, courtesy of a Luka Milivojevic penalty, and it was 4-0 in stoppage time after a close-range finish by Patrick van Aanholt.
A brutal ending for Hull. A burst of sunshine for Allardyce.