The Palace gates were locked against Arsenal yesterday and nobody could find the key. Solid, disciplined defending by Steve Coppell's team forced a scoreless draw at Highbury and a replay at Selhurst Park on Wednesday week.
On the evidence of Crystal Palace's barren form at Selhurst in the Premiership this season, Arsenal will still fancy their chances of a quarter-final at home to Blackburn Rovers or West Ham United. But in the FA Cup, where they have yet to concede a goal, Palace have already won twice in front of their supporters.
More pertinently, perhaps, they held Arsenal there in a goalless draw last October, and for much the same reasons. Yesterday Hermann Hreidarsson, Palace's Icelandic centre-back, reattached himself to Dennis Bergkamp and managed to deny the Dutchman space in most of the dangerous areas.
When Bergkamp is held - and Hreidarsson often did so quite literally - Arsenal find it difficult to function. Throughout the match, while they played with patience, they lacked the perception for once to create anything of significance through the middle.
Arsene Wenger, the Arsenal manager, grumbled mildly about the number of times Hreidarsson stopped his man illegally. "We will have to buy Bergkamp an extra shirt," he said. "I think the referees in this country are not used to man-for-man marking, and when it happens they don't know when to whistle."
"Bergkamp backs in a lot," retorted Coppell, "and he's as strong as an ox. The natural reaction is to shove back, but Hermann stood his ground. It was a case of being more sinned against than sinning."
Wenger had few complaints about the result. "Maybe we deserved to win because of the number of chances we created," he reflected, "but our game lacked creative sparkle. Crystal Palace defended well. They stood together for 90 minutes."
Arsenal's immediate worry is a sudden shortage of centre-backs. Yesterday, as Tony Adams started a two-match suspension, they lost Steve Bould midway through the second half with a broken thumb. Adams will be available at Chelsea on Wednesday, when Arsenal defend a 2-1 lead in the second leg of the English League Cup semi-finals, but will miss the Premiership fixture at home to Palace on Saturday, returning for the Selhurst replay.
A penalty for either team might have won yesterday's tie had the decisions been given. This was another of those days when Martin Bodenham's refereeing smacked of two of the wise monkeys rolled into one. He heard no evil and, what was more to the point, he saw no evil.
Four minutes before half-time, a keenly-angled lob from Andy Roberts caught Arsenal moving up too late to catch Jamie Fullarton offside as he broke clear on the right. Alex Manninger, Arsenal's Austrian goalkeeper who is deputising for the injured David Seaman, is inclined to rush out where fools fear to tread, and now he took Fullarton's legs away inside the area with such force that both players ended up outside the line.
Bodenham booked Manninger and gave Crystal Palace nothing more than a free kick. A week earlier, in the league match against Chelsea at Highbury, Bould had stayed on the pitch after an early professional foul on Gianluca Vialli. Arsenal should start buying tickets in the national lottery.
Just before the hour, Stephen Hughes, enjoying a rare run on the left, was brought down by Roberts in the Palace penalty area, but this time Bodenham decided that no offence had been committed. Some might have felt that this evened things up, but the earlier decision was arguably more crucial to the outcome.
If Arsenal are to reach the sixth round they will have to show more inventiveness in what will be their fourth game against Crystal Palace this season. Not that their pedestrian efforts at Port Vale, where they won a third round replay only on penalties, were a happy augury.
Palace spent most of yesterday afternoon defending in depth. From time to time they managed to break away, but Tomas Brolin, a portly, sluggish version of the player he used to be, did not have the pace to worry Arsenal. Bruce Dyer's influence was largely peripheral and Dean Gordon kept falling offside.
Bould came as close as any Arsenal player to scoring when he just failed to follow up in time after Kevin Miller had parried a 30-yard drive from Bergkamp on the half-hour. Marc Overmars, the man most likely to turn Palace's defence, sent an angled shot into the side netting in each half.
Once Patrick Vieira, still with a touch of flu, had replaced Bould, with Emmanuel Petit dropping into the back four, Arsenal had a better chance of surprising Palace's massed defences, and eventually they brought on David Platt, the arch-stealer of winning goals. But it all came to nothingnothing in the end.
