Ruthless Newcastle climb to third with 5 0 Palace thrashing

NEWCASTLE, England - Newcastle United thumped Crystal Palace 5-0 at St James’ Park on April 16 to go third in the Premier League table with a sixth consecutive win in all competitions as Jacob Murphy scored one goal and set up another.

Newcastle have 59 points from 32 games and are five points clear of sixth-placed Chelsea in the race for Champions League qualification next season with the top five teams earning a place. Palace have 43 points and are 12th.

Harvey Barnes, Fabian Schar and Alexander Isak also scored for Newcastle, as the visitors’ night was compounded by an own goal from defender Marc Guehi and a missed penalty by Eberechi Eze when they trailed 1-0.

Newcastle were again without manager Eddie Howe in the dugout as he continues to recover from pneumonia, but the performance would have been just the tonic as they scored some excellent goals and were ruthless in punishing Palace errors.

It was the first time Palace have failed to score in 13 Premier League fixtures, though remarkably their expected goals tally of 2.02 was better than that of Newcastle (1.39).

Newcastle played with tenacity, pace and efficiency in the final third as they opened the scoring on 14 minutes through Murphy’s thunderous shot from a tight angle that beat goalkeeper Dean Henderson high at his near post.

Penalty miss

The visitors were awarded a penalty by the Video Assistant Review when home goalkeeper Nick Pope came to punch a free-kick that had been floated into the box and clattered into defender Chris Richards.

But Eze’s spot-kick was desperately poor and lacked power or accuracy, giving Pope his first penalty save for five years.

Inside two minutes of that miss, Newcastle doubled their advantage as a game that should have been 1-1 was suddenly 2-0