Opinion: Burnley's never-ending nightmare takes another demoralising turn at Crystal Palace

In all seriousness, the nightmare just won’t end, will it?

We thought the Arsenal mauling was bad, and boy it was, but in many ways this was worse. Everything just continues to go wrong.

The trip to Selhurst Park was rightly billed as a must-win game, or a crucial fixture at least in Burnley’s fading survival bid. Even Vincent Kompany didn’t try to play down its significance.

Many, if not all of the Clarets that made the trip down to South London will have been doing so in hope rather than expectation. That tends to be the case when your team has only won a measly three games out of 25, or 26 as it now is.

We weren’t expecting much, but once again what was served up fell way, way below expectations.

Well beaten

You don’t need statistics to tell you how this game played out, your eyes will do that. But the statistics make for grim reading: Crystal Palace’s Expected Goals (xG) was 2.50 compared to Burnley’s pitiful 0.09. They even managed 0.27 against Arsenal last week.

Burnley’s only real spells of pressure came towards the end of proceedings, when the game was already dead and buried. Even then, they failed to muster a shot on target.

To be fair, they were wrongly robbed of a late consolation when David Fofana’s close-range header was bizarrely ruled out due to Lorenz Assignin supposedly infringing the goalkeeper standing in an offside position. But even if it had counted, it wouldn’t have meant much in the grand scheme of things.

The narrative of the game will be that the red card was decisive. The scoreline was goalless at the time, after all, with all three goals coming when Palace made use of their man advantage. But that doesn’t exactly tell the full story.

The Clarets were comfortably second best prior to the red. Palace, clearly boosted by Oliver Glasner’s arrival, started the game on the front foot and looked like causing problems every time they ventured forward.

The visitors, by comparison, were powderpuff. There was once again no intensity to their play, it was all so slow, ponderous and predictable.

Palace were happy to let Burnley have the ball in certain areas, confident in the knowledge Vincent Kompany’s men weren’t going to hurt them.

Palace are hardly a potent outfit themselves. They’re among the league’s lowest scorers, or they were at least until Burnley rocked into town. But you still had a nagging feeling it was just a matter of time until the Eagles edged ahead, whether it was with a moment of brilliance, the ball falling kindly to them from one of their numerous balls into the box or Adam Wharton, the ex-Blackburn Rovers man who was consistently booed by the travelling contingent, looking like unlocking Burnley’s backline.

As it was, Burnley deserve some element of credit for resisting for as long as they did once Josh Brownhill was sent off for a real moment of madness.

Suicidal

Not from Brownhill, mind you, but James Trafford. There was absolutely no need to play the ball into Brownhill on the edge of his box, given Jefferson Lerma had already embarked on his press before Trafford had played the pass. The ball just wasn’t on.

This is where inexperience and naivety comes into play. Trafford continues to prove he’s a fine shot stopper but in the key, decisive moments, he’s making some poor, and ultimately costly calls.

Once Lerma nicked ahead of Brownhill to steal the ball, the skipper had no option but to haul him down, otherwise the Palace man would have had a clear route to goal. Equally, referee Lewis Smith had no option but to brandish a straight red.

It was a suicidal decision from Trafford that ultimately proved to be the death knell in the game. In many ways it summed up the season at large.

There was another moment that stood out like a sore thumb. Barely one minute into a game of huge magnitude, Charlie Taylor overhit a volleyed pass back to Trafford that bounced over the goalkeeper and almost ended up in the back of his own net. Thankfully it bounced a few yards wide of the post and didn’t go in, but talk about setting the tone…

Burnley kept Palace at bay for as long as they could, until the 68th minute in fact. But once the first went in, the floodgates opened and Burnley completely fell to pieces, conceding three times in little over 10 minutes.

That’s entertainment

We’ve now reached that stage of the season when Burnley fans are having to resort to gallows humour to entertain themselves, because they’re not getting any validation on the pitch.

When their team finally had an attempt on goal in the second half, a harmless David Fofana header that dropped well wide, the travelling fans belted out “we’ve had a shot”.

Moments later, when the Clarets finally strung a few passes together, the chant soon changed to “we’ve got the ball”. Inevitably, “we’ve lost the ball” soon followed.

What else is there to do? Burnley are heading down without much of a fight the way it’s going.

This was the first of four – on paper at least – supposedly winnable fixtures, and they’ve gone and lost the first one 3-0 without as much as laying a glove on their opponents. The fans are right to feel aggrieved.

This wasn’t how the season was supposed to pan out. You don’t go from cruising to the Championship title and collecting 101 points along the way to collecting a measly 13 from 26 games. Or at least you’re not supposed to.

Something has drastically gone wrong, that much is clear.