Premier League: The case for Wickham excelling at Crystal Palace

Michael Lintorn
04 August 2015

Connor Wickham should benefit from a far more accomplished support cast at Crystal Palace

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Michael Lintorn wears his contrarian cap to craft a case for Connor Wickham being a £7 million success for Crystal Palace...

"There have been enough hot streaks in Wickham’s nascent career to demonstrate that he has the quality to shine in the right environment."

The general consensus is that Crystal Palace made their first misstep of an otherwise triumphant transfer window in spending £7 million to sign Connor Wickham from Sunderland. That argument is widely accessible though, so allow Betting.Betfair to present the alternative viewpoint for balance.

A handy starting point is to remember that there was similar scorn the last time that the Eagles paid over the average for a striker, relinquishing a reported £4.5 million to recruit Dwight Gayle from League One side Peterborough.

Nowadays, the Gayle complaint has shifted from "why did they pay so much for him" to "why is a player who has scored 18 goals in 24 starts so underutilised", which surely vindicates the outlay.

Another valid defence is that there have been enough hot streaks in Wickham's nascent career to demonstrate that he has the quality to shine in the right environment. Those purple patches both predate his ill-feted £8 million move to Sunderland as an 18-year-old in 2011 and occurred since.

He fired nine times in his final 19 Championship games for Ipswich before his high-profile switch, struck eight times in 11 loan outings for Sheffield Wednesday in 2013/14 and, most memorably, returned to Wearside at the end of that campaign to net the five goals that kept his parent club up.

That included a late brace when his team were on a five-match losing streak and trailing soon-to-be champions Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium and an equaliser at Chelsea, and earned him the Premier League Player of the Month award for April 2014.

A further reason to expect a different Wickham at Palace to the one that didn't live up to his weighty price tag at the Stadium of Light is that it is unfair to judge any forward on their output at Sunderland in recent seasons.

The Black Cats have paced through five managers since November 2011 (Wickham only worked with the boss who signed him, Steve Bruce, for five months) and each one has overhauled the squad, without ever noticeably improving it.

Nobody scored more than 11 league goals for them in any of the past five terms, so it wasn't like he was being outperformed. He has just been doing the best he could with an unremarkable and constantly changing supply line.

By contrast, at Selhurst Park, he will benefit from the service of Yohan Cabaye (check out Demba Ba and Papiss Cisse's Newcastle figures in 2011/12), Yannick Bolasie, Wilfried Zaha and Jason Puncheon.

Glenn Murray prospered to the extent of notching seven times in nine starts towards the end of 2014/15, and he had never received a run of Premier League starts before. Imagine what someone with Wickham's natural ability and 79 top-flight fixtures' knowhow could do in that environment.

Yes, Alan Pardew has loaned Patrick Bamford from Chelsea too, but Wickham is the one that he has invested £7 million and a five-year contract in. On that basis, he has to be considered an intriguing bet at 4/1 to be Crystal Palace's top league goal-getter.

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