Sam Allardici must have been having a chuckle into his large glass of wine this weekend. Big gruff British Sam is not to everyone's taste. But while his Palace side completed a treble of wins against Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool, two of the Premier League's more exalted foreign gaffers, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, were struggling.
Admittedly Pep's Man City were unlucky to lose to Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final, hitting the post and bar late on. But Guardiola could end up the season without a trophy and if Man United beat them in their next fixture, finish outside the top four.
CITY IN NEED OF A PEP TALK
Pep's first move was to oust a decent double league-winning goalkeeper in Joe Hart and replace him with Claudio Bravo, who can pass the ball out with his feet, but can sometimes let shots go straight through him. In the recent TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, there was a preposterous German architect who declared that stairs ruined his designs. You can imagine Guardiola similarly insisting that a bog-standard shot-stopping keeper is an offence against footballing impressionism.
City are more a forward line than a team. Pep's other major defensive signing was John Stones, a fine ball-playing centre back but a player still learning when to hit Row Z. Manuel Pellegrini was sacked at Man City after winning the League Cup and finishing fourth, having won the title the previous season. You sense that such harsh standards won't be applied to Guardiola because of the trophies he has won at Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
KOP QUESTION KLOPP
Meanwhile Jurgen Klopp might be a lovely bloke, but he still hasn't solved the problems at goalkeeper and centre back that he inherited from Brendan Rodgers. New 'keeper Karius has been dropped and Matip and Klaven haven't brought stability at the back. Ironically Klopp's best Liverpool centre back Mamadou Sakho is now on loan at Crystal Palace. Sakho was incorrectly suspended for 30 days by Uefa in April 2006 for taking a banned substance (Uefa later quashed the charges) forcing him to miss the Europa League Final. Then he was frozen out by Klopp, apparently after tardiness on a pre-season tour last summer. Sir Alex Ferguson might have been a disciplinarian, but he could also find ways of bending rules in order to keep his best players. Klopp also let go Christian Benteke who scored twice for Palace against Liverpool.
So Guardiola and Klopp do not look much further forward than their predecessors in the task of turning their sides into trophy machines. It's likely they will both eventually succeed, but they are also lucky that their reputations have left them immune to the harsh demands placed upon their predecessors. There are questions to answer and both men might have to do something more readily associated with British gaffers and get back to the basics of a Big Sam-style strong spine.
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