Stoke City already assume a significance in Crystal Palace's season. As Alan Pardew's team host the Potteries club on Saturday, it promises to be an auspicious occasion. Their last meeting was memorable, albeit not quite in the fashion Palace may have wanted.
They triumphed 2-1 at the Britannia Stadium in December. It was their last league win and the last time one of their players found the net in the top flight. It also featured the only league goal that one of their strikers has scored this season. Even that, from Connor Wickham, was a penalty.
Now Wickham faces a three-match ban for violent conduct. If it creates a vacancy, Palace have found a high-profile way of filling it. Emmanuel Adebayor’s move to Selhurst Park was finalised on Tuesday. He could debut Saturday.
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The Togolese has a capacity to polarise. Often compared to Nwankwo Kanu, seeming Thierry Henry’s replacement at Arsenal and a man who has featured for three of the Premier League’s top four clubs, plus Real Madrid, he has only played 17 minutes’ football in a year.
He has ability in abundance yet one with the capacity to wreak havoc seems to have a habit of causing his own problems. There are questions about his match sharpness, but history suggests he soon adjusts to new surroundings. He scored on his Arsenal, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur debuts and on his first Real start. Stoke should consider themselves warned.
Mark Hughes, the manager who took Adebayor to the Etihad Stadium in 2009, knows better than most about his destructive and self-destructive streak. The 31-year-old forward scored in his first four City games, but also incurred a three-match suspension for kicking Robin van Persie in the face. Within two years, Roberto Mancini, Hughes’s successor, had banished Adebayor to training with the reserves. Roque Santa Cruz, also unwanted as a player but a less divisive character, was still permitted to work with the first team.
Where Palace, who are only committed to keeping him until the end of the season, cannot be faulted, is in the duration of his contract. Adebayor has a habit of starting well at a new club. Relations have tended to sour thereafter. Tottenham resorted to paying him off. Adebayor materialised at Selhurst Park, citing his love for London as a reason for rejecting other offers, and claiming: “I don’t have anything personally to achieve.”
As Togo’s greatest footballer and a man with 176 career goals to his name, he could make that claim. After two brief cameos in 12 months and a solitary medal – from the 2011 Copa del Rey – in his career, an alternative perspective is that he has plenty to prove.
Accusations of greed dogged him when, with Tottenham making it clear he had no future there, he spurned other offers last summer. Disciplinarian managers, whether Mancini or Mauricio Pochettino, have exiled him.
He presents a test of Alan Pardew’s man-management skills; not in the short term, where his motivation tends to be at its highest, but whether he can sustain the form he is capable of and maintain harmony with his new colleagues.
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