Patrick Vieira: Crystal Palace were ‘second best’ in 3-0 Everton defeat
Patrick Vieira believes lamented the performance of his Crystal Palace side in their 3-0 defeat to Everton at Goodison Park.
The Eagles were 1-0 down after 11 minutes when Dominic Calvert-Lewin turned Marc Guehi inside the penalty area and slotted the ball past Vicente Guaita to give Frank Lampard’s side the lead.
Everton doubled their tally after half time through Anthony Gordon. Left-back Vitalii Mykolenko took aim from just inside the box, but Guaita’s save saw the ball fall to Gordon, who tapped into an empty net.
Dwight McNeil added a third late on when he was allowed space to drive towards the Palace goal and exchanged passes with Alex Iwobi before slotting past Guaita.
“It was a bad performance from us. We were second best in every department of the game,” Vieira told BBC.
“We saw a team who played with determination to win and we didn’t match that level.
“We can talk and try to analyse the game, but we didn’t have the basics of the game.
“It was a bad team performance. We didn’t start well at all. We lost the ball in our own half, and the way that we recovered wasn’t aggressive enough.
“We have to understand that we weren’t the best team when we won our last game, and we’re not the worst team because we lost today.
“The consistency that we need, we didn’t have that, and we have to keep working. Today, it wasn’t the score that we wanted, and we didn’t perform the way that we wanted.
“You have to give Everton credit. They played well, but we didn’t help ourselves with a performance like that.”