Patrick Vieira believed Crystal Palace were owed a bit of luck as they claimed a 2-0 victory over Premier League champions Manchester City at the Etihad.
Patrick Viera said: “People may think it was harsh or not harsh, I let them make their opinion. When you come to a place like City you have to be prepared to suffer and hope a decision goes in your favour. All these decisions went in our favour. In the games so far we have been really unlucky and today it went in our favour. We knew today we would not create as much as we would want to but the couple [of chances] we were going to create were important for us to take. Wilfried taking his chance was important for us and then after that we defended really well. The back four had a terrific game, when you’re looking at Jordan [Ayew] or [Odsonne] Edouard coming in to play 2-vs-1s because we know their strength in 1vs1s. When you look at the work of Wilf up front that is the spirit that we have at the moment in our football club.”
Pep Guardiola’s side had already been stunned when Connor Gallagher jumped on a poor backpass from Aymeric Laporte in the sixth minute and fed Wilfried Zaha for the opening goal. And bad turned to worse for the hosts when Laporte was sent off at the end of the first half for bringing Zaha down in what was deemed to be the denial of a goalscoring opportunity. City were bemused by the decision, with Ruben Dias questioning the call after the match in his interviews. Palace boss Vieira did not deny that it could be argued that it should not have been a sending-off, but praised the effort of his players over the 90 minutes to make sure they got a result.
