CAN PALACE POSSIBLY COPE WITHOUT WILFRIED ZAHA?

Aaron Wan-bissaka leaving was an undeniably big blow for Crystal Palace, but as Oscar Wilde so memorably said on Match of the Day, to lose one homegrown superstar is a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness.

At the time of writing, Wilf is still a Crystal Palace player – and to be honest, writing this preview is hard when I’ve been crossing my fingers so much, I have repetitive strain injury.

And that ‘Wilf’ is important. To us he’s not ‘Zaha’, he’s not ‘Wilfried Zaha’, he’s just ‘Wilf’. If you stand at the very top of the Arthur Wait Stand and lean out as far as you can, you can just about see the primary school that Wilf went to. He’s as local as it gets, and losing him would be a genuine sickener. In particular, losing him to Arsenal would be even worse, seeing as we have as much chance of playing Champions League football as they do.

It wouldn’t just be that we were losing a brilliant and unpredictable player. (I watched George Best play for Manchester United and Fulham; when he got the ball, a sort of expectant purr went round the home fans. The same thing happens with Wilf.) Not only that, we would be losing a talisman. He’s our Matt Le Tissier: we know he’s brilliant, but we don’t want him going somewhere else to prove it.

Wan-bissaka is a brilliant right-back, but he’s just a right-back. There are loads of them. There’s only one Wilf. That’s why we’ve slapped such a huge price tag on him. Chairman Steve Parish’s logic is simple: going down would cost us £110 million; we are more likely to be relegated without Wilf; therefore it will cost you £110 million to buy him.

Truth is, we are more likely to get relegated without him, and not just because we very rarely win when he doesn’t play (although that’s not as true as it used to be: having lost all 10 of the 2017-18 Premier League games he didn’t start, Palace won two of the four last season, even if one was against Fulham so it barely counts). More importantly, it would depress the whole place before a ball has even been kicked.

We are realists. We know we have to produce our own talent to survive. But to thrive, we have to keep them. If Wilf forced a move away, it would send out a message that we can never compete with the big clubs, so what’s the point?

And none of us would sleep for worrying how many goals he will score against us.