Newcastle United manager Rafael Benitez has voiced his frustration at his team’s failure to deal with Crystal Palace’s counter attacks on Saturday.
A late penalty from Luka Milivojevic stole all three points for the Eagles on Saturday, coming after Wilfried Zaha was fouled in the box following a lightning Palace counter.
Benitez wasn’t happy: “A team that is dangerous, you cannot give them two or three chances to play on the counter-attack in the last few minutes,” he said, as per the Shields Gazette. “Even if you have to score, you have to keep the team well organised and regain the ball, like we did for 80 minutes.
“I was so disappointed, because we were talking about that in the whole week. It was clear for a while, but after we made a mistake, we made more mistakes in the last few minutes. We knew it was an important game, and we were doing a lot of good things, but my disappointment is that what happened is what we knew might happen.”
OPINION
Newcastle actually played pretty well for the majority of the game on Saturday, but they did come undone at crucial moments and failed to deal with the Palace counter when it most mattered. The Magpies, playing at home, were clearly chasing the win, and it ended up costing them. The Eagles are mightily dangerous on the counter, everyone knows that, and it’s clear from Benitez’s words that he was well aware of that fact as well. He drilled that into his team during the week, but they were still undone late on. To be fair, it’s incredibly difficult to deal with players like Zaha, Jeffrey Schlupp and Christian Benteke when they’re flying at you at full speed – especially when you’re attacking yourself to try and win the game. However, as Benitez says, his team needed to be more disciplined despite their eagerness to claim the three points. They weren’t and it ended up costing them a share of the spoils on Saturday.
