It could be dangerous to play with Monreal and Chambers against Palace this weekend
News is coming out that Koscielny has sustained an injury that will rule him out of this weekend’s game and could see him miss that all important game against Besiktas midweek. But without Koscielny for the game against Palace, we will be forced into using Monreal and Chambers as CBs and that could be very dangerous for us.
Pulis loves his strong, tall centre forwards and he has that in Chamakh. This means the likes of Chambers and Monreal defending crosses to Chamakh’s head which may not end well at all. Palace also deploy pacey wingers in Puncheon and Gayle. They could easily combine with Chamakh and exploit the lack of pace and mobility in that CB position.
Then you have the set piece dilemma. Palace have a lot of tall players. They could exploit our lack of heading ability with only Giroud excelling at defending set pieces. Compare that to last season where we’d have Giroud, Sagna, Koscielny and Mertesacker and you can start to see the potential problems.
Finally, I can’t see us benefitting offensively from set pieces with such little height in the team. And that is a problem for us already as we seem to fail with our set pieces and that usually ends up giving the opposition a chance to break on us.
Monreal and Chambers did well against City but they were a different prospect especially being 3-0 down. Against Palace, there could be problems and I’d hate for that to extend into our Champions League qualification matches. I’m hoping the Manolas rumours are true as I don’t like the prospect of us starting the season with no recognisable centre back.