“I’ve watched a few musicals here and there,” Oliver Glasner unexpectedly confided in his press conference before Crystal Palace’s Conference League play-off first leg against the Norwegian side Fredrikstad. “It’s the same in our job, we are entertainers. The players have such great skills in playing football that, like actors, we can watch them and forget what’s around us.”
Thursday is the opening night of a show that Palace hope will run and run, until May. Among the big numbers in the songbook: “F*** Uefa, f*** Marinakis.” But the question is: can the audience lose themselves in the miniature drama under the bright lights? Or will they find it hard to stop their thoughts wandering away from the stage, to the rustlings of real life, to the manoeuvrings behind the scenes, to what the main actors are thinking and feeling once they disappear into the wings and re-emerge in their own lives?
Thursday is Palace’s first match in a major European competition in their 119-year history. It’s a huge deal. But it is also an occasion that has been unmistakably overtaken by events. Palace are only playing in this tournament, rather than the more prestigious Europa League, because they were demoted by Uefa owing to a judgment of multi-club ownership that has left a still-smouldering sense of injustice. And then there are the noises off pertaining to Eberechi Eze and the captain Marc Guéhi, arguably their best two players, and targets of Arsenal and Liverpool respectively.
Guéhi was in good spirits at Palace’s Beckenham training ground as a move to Liverpool appeared imminent
JOHN WALTON/PA WIRE
Neither of them, to their credit, has broken character. In contrast to Alexander Isak and Yoane Wissa, who have pulled themselves out of the spectacle and shattered the illusions of those who pay to watch them, Eze and Guéhi continue to hit all the right marks at all the right moments.
They both played, and played well, against Chelsea on Sunday. “When one of the players will leave, which I don’t know at the moment,” Glasner said, “they want to leave as players who always give 100 per cent for Crystal Palace.”
There was even a fun moment at the club’s Beckenham training ground when the Sky Sports News reporter Gary Cotterill, broadcasting live from the edge of the training pitch as the players were doing their morning warm-up, mentioned the professionalism of Eze just as the man himself was going through his shuttle runs. As he touched the pole nearest Cotterill, he looked into the camera with a cheeky wink and said: “Give it a rest.”
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For Palace, of course, the loss of their best players is a near-inevitability, something baked into their model. And so they face the potential departure of Eze, Guéhi or both, on the eve of this new adventure, with a strange mix of moods: in public, a resolutely tight-lipped adherence to that rigid next-game focus; in private, probably a small amount of sadness and apprehension; but also a defiant confidence founded on precedent. As the goalkeeper Dean Henderson, a likely candidate for the captaincy should Guéhi depart, put it: “We’ve lost players in the past, and we survived through that. When we lost Michael [Olise to Bayern Munich last summer], we followed up with the [club’s] best ever season in 100-odd years.”
Glasner’s experience of European football should stand Palace in good stead in this season’s campaign
REUTERS/PETER CZIBORR
Poor Henderson was rather more flummoxed when a Norwegian journalist rather peskily put him on the spot by asking him if he could name any of Fredrikstad’s players. Honestly, much more of this and goalkeepers will be bringing water bottles with notes taped to them to press conferences too.
There is no doubt that Palace are heavy favourites in this tie (indeed, Opta’s power rankings consider them by far the strongest team in the entire competition). Fredrikstad have lost every single one of their past ten European ties, going back to 1960, to teams as varied as Dynamo Kiev and Bangor City.
But they did win the Norwegian Cup last season. They are well organised and very strong on set pieces. And so there is also just a frisson of danger in this tie. The Conference League might seem right now, to many Palace fans, like an unwanted invitation, a travesty of a reward. But it’s amazing how quickly things can change, how important and coveted that invitation might suddenly feel if Fredrikstad, with an early goal, threaten to loosen it from Palace’s grasp.
Glasner’s experience will stand his team in good stead. The Austrian won the Europa League with Eintracht Frankfurt in 2022, but also had the humility to point out that he lost at this stage of that competition two years earlier with Wolfsburg. He strongly suggested that he would pick Eze and Guéhi in his starting XI.
And here’s the thing: what if he’s right, but not so much about the spectators as the players? What if, for them, those 90 minutes are the one part of the week where whatever is going on with their lives, their professional destinies, just melt away? After all, on Thursday night Eze will walk on to the Selhurst Park pitch, to the anthems and pageantry of European competition, as the star player, the go-to creative genius, in a bold, attacking team. It’s the role he was born to play.
Crystal Palace v Fredrikstad
Europa Conference League play-off, first leg
Thursday 8pm
TV Channel 5
Crystal Palace (probable; 3-4-2-1): D Henderson — C Richards, M Lacroix, M Guéhi — D Muñoz, A Wharton, W Hughes, T Mitchell — I Sarr, E Eze — JP Mateta.
Fredrikstad (probable; 3-5-2): M Borsheim — S Rafn, S Molde, M Woledzi — U Fredriksen, S Owusu, O Ohlenschlager, P Metcalfe, H Skogvold — J Bjartalid, L Owusu.
