Pierre Sage takes charge of his first Premier League match on Saturday afternoon, and he does it with Crystal Palace in an unfamiliar position: holders of a European trophy, without the manager who won it. Palace beat Rayo Vallecano 1-0 in the Conference League final in May, Oliver Glasner left in the summer and is now at Nottingham Forest, and Maxence Lacroix has gone to Chelsea. This season Palace play in the Europa League.
Their hosts finished 13th last season on 49 points, four above Palace in 15th, and closed the campaign without a win in seven. David Moyes has not spent the summer raising expectations. "We're far off from where we want to be," he said during pre-season, adding that he would like to do "a lot more business".
Sage arrived from RC Lens, where he was named Ligue 1's manager of the year and where his work had drawn interest from Liverpool. His pre-season was uneven. A 5-1 win over Swindon Town, with a hat-trick for Matheus Franca, a Brazilian who had drifted out of the picture, was followed by a 3-0 defeat by Bromley and a 3-0 defeat by Lens themselves at the Como Cup, with a host of first-team players occupied by the World Cup rather than by his new ideas.
Four players have arrived: Oscar Mingueza from Celta Vigo, Evann Guessand on loan from Aston Villa, Takehiro Tomiyasu on a free transfer and Dwight McNeil in the swap that sent Brennan Johnson to Everton. A verbal bid for the Monaco midfielder Lamine Camara, understood to be worth more than £35m, was rejected last week.