Crystal Palace 1-1 Nottingham Forest: Stalemate as litigious new-age rivalry transfers to the pitch | OneFootball

The Eagles looked to get their own back after Forest’s complaint saw them relegated from the Europa League

And so the ugly rules-and-regs feud between Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest shifted in format once more — no longer club statement warfare swelled by tubthumping fans hurling out insults on social media. The battleground returned to the more familiar territory of an actual football match. El CASico, as they’re calling it.

The match itself was the closely contested tussle anticipated, Ismaila Sarr swiping cleanly past Matz Sels for a half-time Palace lead, before Dan Ndoye’s outstanding 40-yard pass enabled Callum Hudson-Odoi to earn the visitors a 1-1 draw in which they crashed the woodwork searching for a winner late on.

In the end, there was no seismic off-field event, despite the increased Met Police presence and heightened player security Forest brought with them.

The Palace ultras behind the goal held up one rather graphic and accusatory banner depicting the Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis, and at multiple junctures ditched any sense of clever wordplay in order to chant a message of “F*** UEFA, F*** John Textor, F*** Marinakis”.

Sarr’s opener brought some levity to a tense Selhurst Park

REUTERS

Supporters of Europa League Forest were perched quietly at the other end of the stadium and generally said little, besides the odd reminder that Marinakis is “one of [their] own”.

Cameras panned not to Marinakis in the director’s box — he understandably gave this one a miss — but to England manager Thomas Tuchel. Eagles fans will hope his eye was drawn not to Morgan Gibbs-White but to Adam Wharton, yet to get a look in under the German.

It had already been a week not without incident for both teams. Palace got their Conference League campaign up and running with a nervy 1-0 play-off win at home to Fredrikstad on Thursday — the first match in Europe in the club’s long history. Eberechi Eze never did play against the Norwegians, and now he is an Arsenal player, as Palace’s squad depth and quality takes its latest £67.5million hit.

And for Forest, things were all going rather smoothly after a fantastic win over Brentford on opening weekend. Then came Nuno Espirito Santo’s pre-match press conference and the extraordinary and unexpected admission that he and Evangelos Marinakis do not speak as they used to. Nuno’s job is under threat, just as they prepare for Europe.

Oliver Glasner and Nuno Espirito Santo are both in the hot seat

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A bit like that press conference, this was at times an unsightly watch, neither team moving freely through the lines. Sarr is perhaps the one player of agile guile left at Selhurst Park who still can, and there he was to sweep home from Daniel Munoz’s crafted cut-back to score Palace’s first home league goal of the campaign.

Palace began life after Eze. They know they must bring bodies in before the deadline on September 1, as much to replace his lost quality as to compete across multiple fronts in this maiden season in Europe. Oliver Glasner knows that as well as anyone — and having to promote Justin Devenny to his starting line-up and name academy players Kaden Rodney and Rio Cardines on the bench only served to highlight it. Forest’s bench, by stark contrast, featured Douglas Luiz, Omari Hutchinson and James McAtee.

That squad depth showed when Nuno’s first substitution was to bring off Ndoye and Hudson-Odoi, the pair who had combined for Forest’s second-half equaliser. Palace can only dream of holding such rich options in reserve.

By the time we’d reached those substitutions, this contest was no longer the legal battle battle it had been billed as. It had become just another Premier League game like any other, and one in which a draw was fair. That’s not to say Palace have forgotten about the summer they were relegated without playing a game.