Sky Sports pundit Paul Merson believes that Liverpool face ‘dangerous’ opposition in Crystal Palace when they meet at Anfield on Saturday.
The Reds come face to face with their former manager Roy Hodgson, and Merson believes the Eagles will run the hosts close. Ultimately, though, he feels Liverpool will prevail 2-1.
“This is a dangerous fixture,” he wrote on the Sky Sports website. “It could be a problem for Liverpool. Palace have the tools to hurt them. They’ve got major pace and match-winners in Andros Townsend and Wilfried Zaha.
“They’ve also got an unbelievable manager in Roy Hodgson, who doesn’t get the credit he deserves. He knows how to win these types of games. I think they’ll score. However, if Liverpool are serious about winning the league they must win the game. If they do it could also be a psychological advantage over Man City, who lost to Palace.”
OPINION
It’s interesting that Merson feels this game is going to be so close. You can see where he’s coming from, though, because Palace do tend to raise their game when they play the top teams. They are very inconsistent and that makes it hard to know what they’re going to do. As Merson says, they have genuine match-winners in Townsend and Zaha and they will likely give Liverpool’s injury-ravaged defence some problems. It’s probable that Palace will score, but you have to fancy Liverpool to win this fairly comfortably. It feels like Liverpool got their (relative) poor form out of their system against Brighton last time out, and hopefully they are now back to their best moving forward. If that is the case then they should steamroll Palace, and, ultimately, you have to think that Jurgen Klopp’s team will have too much attacking talent for the Eagles to cope with. However, we’ll have to wait and see what happens on Saturday.
