{"id":5373,"date":"2026-04-13T20:17:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T20:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/?p=5373"},"modified":"2026-04-13T20:17:44","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T20:17:44","slug":"crystal-palace-u21-2-0-under-21-match-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/?p=5373","title":{"rendered":"Crystal Palace U21 2 &#8211; 0 Under 21 &#8211; Match Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Our young Gunners fell to defeat against Crystal Palace in their final regular season fixture of the 2025\/26 PL2 campaign.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Goals either side of half-time from Joe Gibbard and Kaden Rodney secured the win for the hosts.<\/p>\n<h3 dir=\"ltr\">WHAT HAPPENED<\/h3>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The home side started brightly and almost took an early lead when Gibbard fired over from close range.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Our first opportunity came through Ceadach O\u2019Neill, who drove forward with purpose, but his effort trickled just wide of the post.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Palace continued their strong start and made the breakthrough soon after. We struggled to deal with a long, direct ball from the goalkeeper, and a miscommunication at the back allowed Gibbard to lob Khari Ranson and find the net.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">After the break, the hosts were awarded a penalty when Joel Drakes-Thomas was brought down in the area. Rodney stepped up and calmly sent Ranson the wrong way to double Palace\u2019s advantage.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">We pushed to respond, and Demiane Agustien came closest, but his strike was well saved by Harry Lee in the Palace goal.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Despite getting into some promising positions, we were unable to find the cutting edge needed in the final third.<\/p>\n<h3 dir=\"ltr\">WHAT IT MEANS<\/h3>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The result sees us finish the regular season on 29 points from 20 matches.<\/p>\n<h3 dir=\"ltr\">WHAT\u2019S NEXT<\/h3>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Our under-21s will now turn their attention to the Premier League play-offs, starting with an away tie in the last 16.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Opponent and kick-off details will be confirmed in due course.<\/p>\n<article data-entity-type=\"node\" data-entity-uuid=\"40b1fee5-5943-41f5-b81d-3c312a33c0df\" data-embed-button=\"article_embed\" data-entity-embed-display=\"view_mode:node.tiny\" data-langcode=\"en\" data-entity-embed-display-settings=\"()\" class=\"embedded-entity u-spacing-down--xxl\">\n<article data-article-id=\"125846\" about=\"\/news\/u21s-qualify-premier-league-2-play-offs\">\n<div class=\"article-card article-card--tiny card\" data-eq-pts=\"xsmall: 200, small: 550, medium: 640, large: 768\">\n<div class=\"card__content\">\n<p>\n         <span class=\"h6 article-card__subhead\">Read more<\/span>                             <\/p>\n<h3 class=\"article-card__title\" title=\"U21s qualify for Premier League 2 play-offs\"><span class=\"article-card__title-words\">  U21s qualify for Premier League 2 play-offs <\/span><br \/>\n          <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/article>\n<p><\/p>\n<h2 dir=\"ltr\">TEAM NEWS<\/h2>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>Crystal Palace XI: <\/strong>Lee, Whyte, Jemide, King, Farquhar (Drakes-Thomas, 53), Reid, Cardines, Rodney, Umolu (Brownlie, 79), Williams (Obou, 90), Gibbard<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>Subs unused:<\/strong> Left, Adams-Collman<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>Arsenal XI:<\/strong> Ranson, Hamill (Ferdinand, 46), Clarke, Salmon (Ogunnaike, 46), Washington, Ibrahim, Agustien, O\u2019Neill, Harriman-Annous, Stevens (Dudziak, 60), Mooney (Bailey-Joseph, 79)<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>Subs unused:<\/strong> Porter, Bailey-Joseph<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Copyright 2026 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our young Gunners fell to defeat against Crystal Palace in their final regular season fixture of the 2025\/26 PL2 campaign. Goals either side of half-time from Joe Gibbard and Kaden Rodney secured the win for the hosts. WHAT HAPPENED The home side started brightly and almost took an early lead when Gibbard fired over from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}