- 5/29/2025
Oliver Glasner's Crystal Palace are improbable FA Cup winners after an incredible 1-0 win over Manchester City. But in an exhilarating game filled with contentious moments, there's been some criticism of their style of play and the perceived "luck" they had with some decisions.Utter rubbish. Adam Clery breaks down the game (and the side's previous meeting) to show why Palace are a brilliant team and more than worthy winners.
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00:00Hello everybody, welcome to the Adam Cleary football channel, I am by extension Adam Cleary
00:06and if you are a Crystal Palace fan, which statistically you probably are if you clicked
00:11on this, you just... you don't need an introduction, do you? So...
00:20And yeah, we finally got all the new assets and the new graphics. Anyway, first f***s,
00:24we got something in this game of football we have not seen in the English game for
00:28absolutely years, a completely deranged, out of pocket, in his own head, Pep Guardiola,
00:34cup finals starting 11. No defensive midfielder, nobody who can really sit,
00:38nobody who can compete physically with what Crystal Palace have, this is a man
00:43visibly traumatised by the fact he should have been 3-0 down in the game at the Etihad.
00:49So, not wanting to end up in that exact same situation again, he devised this plan to stop it
00:55and, spoiler for the thrust of the entire video, ended up in that exact same situation again.
01:01So I'm going to show you what Pep Guardiola thought he was doing with this system and why
01:06it just made no difference whatsoever to Oli Glasner's Crystal Palace.
01:11Now, because it is impossible to tell the story of this game without first telling the story of the
01:165-2 at the Etihad, Palace were excellent in the opening stages of that game because of the
01:21width that their wing-backs allow them to create. Now, Palace fans, you've seen this a million times
01:26this season, they're so aggressive with the wing-backs, in particular Munoz, that it stretches
01:31out opposition back fours in particular to give Eze and Saar and whoever plays the number 10 roles
01:36loads of space in these half channels, what they're called, half spaces, the pockets, to work in.
01:42And the opening goal in that other game is just this exact formula, they stretch out on the right-hand
01:48side here, the back four loses its line, trying to close down when the ball goes out there.
01:52There's a quick ball into Saar, who's running into that channel, and because Eze started
01:57absolutely miles offside, because he's not involved in that part of the build-up,
02:01they practice this, it's the easiest tap-in he's ever going to get in his life.
02:04And what should have been the third is really similar, except this time it's in a transition,
02:08so Man City have given them that space rather than them creating that space,
02:12but the principles are all exactly the same. They're still attacking that exact area
02:16down the sides of the full-backs. So Guardiola decided his best bet to stop
02:21that happening in the cup final was his use of this man here, Nico O'Reilly.
02:25If we look at his heat map from the league game, you will see he's providing a lot of
02:29width all the way up and down this left-hand side, he's touching the touchline a lot.
02:33He was basically, as the rest of the team shuffled over, the one playing this entire length of the
02:38field, which meant, obviously, Palace had all this space in behind him to attack.
02:43But here, and I'll show you his heat map from the cup final,
02:45the plan was to invert him instead. De Bruyne and Silva kind of shuffled over,
02:49made a little bit of room for him, and he came a lot more into this area of the pitch here.
02:54So he's still able to provide width and he can get back and defend wide,
02:58but because you've got Doku being the one to attack this left-hand space, he can now
03:02cover over, I've knocked him over, into this area a lot better than anybody else could in the other
03:06game. With Doku there and Savinho on the other side, you can see here in the early minutes,
03:11they were both hugging the touchline, trying to stretch Crystal Palace out themselves, but
03:15more importantly, because they're so wide, occupying both the wing backs.
03:20And you had Mamouche playing alongside Haaland in what was almost like a conventional big man,
03:26little man, centre-forward pairing. But behind this four, you had something you almost never see.
03:33It was honestly, at times, deliberately a lopsided 3-and-3. The defenders didn't necessarily
03:40shuffle all the way across to get in behind the space that O'Reilly had left, but likewise,
03:45neither did this new line of midfielders move along to sort of be more central.
03:50And that's actually, in theory, a really, really good decision. If I show you Crystal Palace's average
03:55positions across the 90 minutes, this won't shock you if you've been watching them all season,
03:59but Munoz is a far bigger attacking threat than Mitchell is on the other side. He's the defender
04:05in the Premier League who has created the most chances this season. So by doing this,
04:10you leave O'Reilly a lot further over to cover this space in behind Doku, but from an attacking
04:15perspective, Kevin De Bruyne also thrives in this half space. You don't need him behind Savinho,
04:21either protecting that space or getting on the overlap. You can have him sitting more in this area by
04:26shuffling these three across. And then naturally, because you're lopsided over this side to be more
04:31protected over here, you can sort of leave that and then sort of cover the area that De Bruyne is
04:37not defending over here. So it did look mad at times, and he didn't do it all the time,
04:42but it was a good idea. And it nearly worked really early on. Because Mitchell is the less
04:47attacking of the two wing backs, you want to play in front of him, not the space in behind. De Bruyne gets
04:53the ball in that area exactly where you want it to be, and he picks out Haaland at the back post.
04:58And were it not for a great save from Henderson, was a bit of a theme in this game. That's it,
05:03he won the love. This is a masterstroke. So yeah, I mean, what an idea then. Pep Guardiola,
05:08super genius. But a small downside, it does mean when you're defending, this is sort of the shape you
05:14have. Now, I have one leg, no knees, and a dodgy heart. And I think even I, in this situation,
05:22could potentially get Bernardo Silva and Kevin De Bruyne on a quick break. They got a warning
05:27really early on, sprinting through the middle where a Gonzalez, a Kovacic, a Lewis, a dare I say it,
05:34Rodri would have been positioned, but they did not learn. And then minutes later,
05:38Palace got the goal that wins the whole game. Palace go long from the back, which we are going to talk
05:43about in just a second. And nobody in the area this ball lands can compete with Mateta in there.
05:50They are not as strong as he is, and more importantly, they are not as determined as
05:53he is. So he manages to reclaim that ball, he holds it up, Munoz breaks up that side of the pitch,
05:58as you knew he was going to do. Pep, he feeds him in, and there you go.
06:03So somehow, incredibly, in the first 30 minutes of this cup final, you've simultaneously got Pep Guardiola
06:10inventing a system that is working exactly as he thought it would, and Oliver Glasner still
06:16able to exploit it exactly the way he would have exploited any other system. Because,
06:22for all I genuinely think, this is a really clever setup from Pep Guardiola. His brain didn't
06:28fall out, this was a good idea. It still does nothing to negate exactly what Crystal Palace were
06:35always going to try and do to them. Now, go back to the very start of the goal. They have got you
06:39committed up the pitch in numbers, and they know if they can then release Munoz into the space that
06:46you are leaving them by being this aggressive, he will find one of the number 10s arriving into the box.
06:53Thus, meaning in some kind of just beautifully twisted logic that Pep Guardiola was so keen to avoid
07:00conceding this kind of goal, he then went and conceded exactly this kind of goal. Football's just
07:09like so stupid sometimes, isn't it? If we just get rid of Man City and replace them with Crystal
07:16Palace, I've got no idea how much I'm going to be bothered to animate some of this today, by the
07:19way. I'm recording it immediately after the cup final. This is my Saturday night, but I'm editing it
07:24right after I've run the Hackney half, so God knows what's doing. Anyway, we go back to Crystal Palace
07:29here, and if I show you all the passes out from the back of these two centre backs, it would have
07:35been gay as well, but he barely did anything, to be honest, on the ball. What do you notice? There's
07:41a couple of little tippy-tappies here when they've got it at the back, and they're trying to work out
07:45whose go it is to go along, but by and large, all of these are going extremely long, either into this
07:52area here for Mateta or into this area here for Munoz. I keep saying Munoz as well, with a real
07:59emphasis on the end, and now for the life of me, I can't remember if that's right or not. Munoz.
08:03It's not Munoz, is it? Munoz is funny. Now, it's even more obvious when you bin the centre backs off
08:10and just look at Dean Henderson, like modern-day Premier League goalkeepers. There's dozens left and
08:16right here as they try and move an opposition press around. No interest in that whatsoever. He knew
08:21exactly where he was trying to land that ball. It was because every time they had it at the back,
08:26Man City piled up, and that is what Crystal Palace want you to do. And it's one of those systems,
08:31especially when you deploy it against a team like Manchester City, that's not going to work
08:36lots. Like, we've all seen the start, like right before the goal, they had 17. Team won 7% of the
08:42ball to Man City having 83. But it is one of those systems that when it does work, is going to create
08:48you a situation like this, which is infinitely better than the wall of like 9 or 10 players
08:55you're going to come up against if you've got 83% of the ball. But anyway, so they get in 1-0 at
09:00half-time with this, and Pep Guardiola, he's got 15 minutes to come up with some genius masterstroke
09:05to try and unpick this resolute defence. And genuinely, all he seemed to come up with for that
09:11first 30 minutes was, I would argue, equally as blunt and direct as this was.
09:16Docu and Savino, I've got them here, they went from attempting to pin those wing backs back
09:22unsuccessfully, in my opinion, to just going around them and desperately trying to get crosses stood up
09:29flat into the box. This is combined all the crossing they did in the first 45 minutes,
09:35not really a lot there, and this is all the crossing they did in the second 45 minutes. And if you weren't
09:41paying total attention, because you were a bag of nerves or you were at the bar, or something,
09:44I can tell you, all but like two or three of these are from minute 45 to minute 50. So it's clearly
09:51an instruction from the changing room, and they just went out and did it. Now, I'm not a coach,
09:57yet, but I would argue that devising a master plan whereby you're hanging up flat crosses into a box
10:04that could potentially have five defenders in it. And all you've got, admittedly, it's not bad,
10:10but all you've got is one Erling Haaland, unlikely to yield dramatic results. That would be my
10:18assessment. Unsurprisingly, the five of them, but the three big centre backs they've got in there,
10:23obviously, in particular, gobbled that up very easily. And in fact, it is quite interesting, because the
10:28aerial situation, the threat offered by Crystal Palace, was something that Guardiola touched on in the
10:32build-up to this game. Now, part of me thinks maybe it was a little dig in the ribs at Arsenal,
10:37part of me thinks it was the credit that they are due, but he did say, he thought Crystal Palace
10:42were the best set-piece team in the Premier League. Or words that mean that exact thing,
10:47that are the correct quote, because I didn't look it up. And said complemented skill set was the thing
10:51that nearly got them tuning it up, because that comes from a long throw, which is a set-piece,
10:56by the way. It's slung in, Palace compete better for the ball, and from the breakaway,
11:01they so, so nearly get that goal. But wind it back a bit, like before the throw-in,
11:08that comes from just a weird heads-not-screwed-on-right mix-up that City get themselves into.
11:15And I think that, as much as the tactics and systems and shapes and all that stuff,
11:19is something that's very important to look at. Stuff like this was just the indecisive,
11:24half-arsed vibe that Man City had throughout the entire game. And despite all of the possession,
11:30being so weighted in their favour, Palace were fighting them for absolutely everything,
11:35and it felt like they were winning an awful lot more than City were. And I actually think
11:40very little will surmise the Crystal Palace approach to this game. Quite like this,
11:45my favourite ever optograph to steal. This is every single defensive action Crystal Palace made in the
11:51entire 90 minutes. It is blocks, it is interceptions, it is tackles, it is headers,
11:56it is clearances, it is ball recoveries. Look at where these are focused. City can have as much
12:03of the ball as they want, here, here, and even into sort of these areas here, and even a little bit
12:08around the sides. But as soon as they pose any threat to this Crystal Palace area, every single
12:15player, bodies on the line, feet into tackle, being brave, being committed, giving themselves the right
12:22to then try and play their kind of football. And it's a total cliche, that expression,
12:27like give yourself the right to play. But it is what it takes to go into an FA Cup final against
12:32a side like Manchester City and win your first trophy in the history of your club ever. Because
12:37there are going to be moments where that quality tells, where the possession finally yields chances,
12:42and you've got to be in a position and mentally ready to make that block. Maybe it's too late,
12:48maybe you can't get there. But maybe, just like the Nico O'Reilly chance later on, maybe they give
12:53you that opportunity to make that block. And you're only going to do it if you try to do it. A lot of
12:59teams would be like, oh no, we've been played through. I guess they score. Not one single player in that
13:05Crystal Palace team was prepared to accept a moment like that. Even in the very, very last minutes of
13:11this game, the ball breaks in the box and you've got two players, you've got three players throwing
13:16themselves in the line of these shots in the hope that maybe they'll get a block into that. They
13:23gave Manchester City absolutely nothing. And when that didn't work, when Man City just created
13:29something instead of being given it, you had Dean Henderson. Dean O'Zoff, as I've seen him get
13:36caught on Twitter. The saves, the penalty, the claims. I'm just obsessed with this hat now. He's
13:41absolutely incredible. And should he have been on the pitch in the first place? No.
13:48No, of course he shouldn't have been. Goalkeepers Union here. And even I was like, well,
13:52that's a red card. I thought it was going insane, actually, the way people were like, well, you know,
13:56the ball's moving away from the goal. I was like, well, yeah, because of course it's going that way.
14:01Because he hit with his hand that way, in that direction, outside the box. But who cares? Like,
14:09I thought that Man City penalty was a dive by David Silver and they got that. So it all balanced out
14:14in the end, in my opinion. And just, if you're going to make those sorts of saves and that sort
14:20of contribution in a cup final, again, wearing a hat, I think you deserve the entire world. Granted,
14:28it's not my most scientific opinion I've ever had on this channel, but I was, I was just really happy
14:34for him for reasons. So yeah, this video doesn't need to be like 25 minutes long. It was incredibly
14:40sort of simple premise. Oliver Glasner got the Crystal Palace formula absolutely bang on
14:46in this game. There was nothing Manchester City could really do about it. And they got their share
14:52of the look when they needed it. And they made their own look when they didn't. It's a, it's a classic
14:57sort of underdog cup final performance. Like I could stand here for as long as you want talking
15:02about the tactical side of it and the structure, uh, both teams employed, but absolutely everything
15:07in this game, the application, the body language, it was all screaming from the very first minute.
15:13The Crystal Palace wanted this more than Man City and we're going to get it. But if I may
15:18just be permitted as one final point to rewind like 20, 20 seconds. Wasn't really counting.
15:25That word that everybody's using, including me just there, upset. I don't think this game here,
15:32when you actually think about it, is an upset, really. Like you would make, based on like the
15:37structure of the club and the finances and the value of the squads, you'd make Crystal Palace
15:41underdogs, sure. But the result, I don't think it's an upset. And that is because, and this was
15:47touched upon in the buildup and on commentary, right? Crystal Palace had a minging start to the
15:52season. Those first 13 games when they had to adjust to losing a Lise and slightly tweaking
15:57the system, a difficult time, you would argue, they nearly got Oliver Glasner the sack. But if
16:03you take just one minute to look at the Premier League table since those first 13 games, so after
16:09they got their heads around all of these changes, just look at which two teams are right next to each
16:15other. 42 and 41 points. 12 wins to City to 11 wins for Palace, but Palace have actually lost one game
16:24less in that time, which is like two thirds of a season-ish than Man City have. They had every right,
16:32in my opinion, to go into this game showing no fear and believing they could win. I don't ever want to
16:39hear the word upset about this cup final, right? Crystal Palace are just f***ing class. And that's it,
16:45that's the whole video. As somebody else who thought he'd never see his team win a trophy and got to this
16:50year, this is brilliant. I absolutely love this game of football and I loved this result for the team,
16:57for the fans, for Eze in particular. Like, it's what makes football worth watching on occasion. And I think that's the first time I've ever done a video on Crystal Palace, so I'm pleased
17:09I waited for an occasion as illustrious as this. And hopefully, hey, it won't be the last one, so if
17:14you have enjoyed watching this and you are a member of the... God, what are they? I used to live in Crystal
17:19Palace as well. How do I not know this? What do they call you guys? The Palaces. Eagles, fly high, aha! Or whatever
17:25it is. Please do subscribe to us here at ACFC. I really want 100,000 subs by the end of the season and I'm
17:30getting very greedy about it. So if you could do that or possibly tell your friends, that'd be great. And as I
17:36mentioned before, I am recording this video before I do the Hackney Half Marathon, but I'll be sitting
17:40here editing it. Give them a wave! Saw Adam on the Monday after I've done it, so it's not too late
17:46still. If you want to do a quick little donation to Calm the Campaign for Living Miserably, that is who
17:51I was running for. I presume it went okay. I presume I'm editing this and not in a hospital bed
17:57somewhere. Fingers crossed. And meanwhile, you can get me across all the social medias. How cool
18:04is that? Adam Cleary, C-L-E-L-Y on every single platform you want. But until next time,
18:09thank you so much for watching. You have been locked in to the... That's never going to stick. Adam Cleary,
18:14football channel. Crystal Palace won the FA Cup. Class. Brilliant. Love that. Goodbye.
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