The weekend’s loss to Chelsea was a weird one.

It felt like Palace were cast aside pretty easily by everyone’s Champions-elect, but the 2-1 score line suggests it was a close encounter.

In reality, for most of the game Palace could not get near enough to the smooth Chelsea passing and possession to trouble them.

While the Eagles weren’t diabolical, the blues never had to sweat. They looked comfortable despite a pretty solid first half from the home side, with Oscar’s early free kick-putting Palace firmly on the back foot.

When César Azpilicueta was rightly dismissed for a crazily wild tackle, Jose Mourinho didn’t even blink.

Before the Spanish left back had left the field his like-for-like replacement was ready to come on.

Whereas, when Damien Delaney received his second yellow, Neil Warnock began a series of decisions and non-decisions that cost Palace any hope of getting back into the game.

Rather than bringing on Adrian Mariappa immediately, James McArthur inexplicably took up the full back role and Kelly covered Delaney’s absence.

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This sacrificed the centre of the pitch, giving Cesc Fabregas the freedom of Selhurst even more so than before, and instigated the horribly mismatched duel on Chelsea’s left flank between Eden Hazard and McArthur.

Oh well, at least at half time Warnock will obviously change tha… No. For some utterly bizarre reason the Palace boss persisted with this unnatural patch up job.

I know this was against Chelsea, we didn’t expect to win and their second goal was a fast-paced, ping-ponging, precise piece of perfection, but every decision Warnock made defied reason.

When Wilfried Zaha and Adlène Guédioura were introduced, Yannick Bolasie was put up top on his own.

I still can’t for the life of me understand why Campbell, our striker, dropped to the wing and our winger was left bluntly up front in a position that nullified essentially all of his best attributes.

And yes, that's the same Yannick Bolasie who was playing in Stade Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Côte d’Ivoire, only three days previously - an almost 10,000 mile round trip.

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The referee showed awful inconsistency with yellow card decisions but both the reds were probably justified.

At the time I thought Delaney’s first card was unfair but with the benefit of television replays it was clearly a badly missed lunge.

The second card was soft but it was a stupid and reckless decision to grab Louic Remy as he passed anyway.

As a result, our back four will have an even more worryingly makeshift look against Sunderland –especially if Scott Dann is still absent.

There isn’t too much we can do about the defence right now, but Warnock needs to make more logical tactical decisions with attacking substitutions if we want any hope of being able to score our way out of this rut.