Jack Collins, Sam Tighe and Dean Jones discussed every Premier League captain on the most recent edition of the Ranks FC podcast and they spent some time talking about Crystal Palace skipper Luka Milivojevic during the show.
Milivojevic has played in five of Palace’s first six games of the 2020/21 Premier League campaign but he only started one of those games and he has accumulated just 138 minutes of top-flight football so far this term, which is a lower number of minutes than as many as 15 other Eagles players have spent on the pitch in the league so far this season.
While talking about the 29-year-old Serbian during this recent edition of the Ranks FC podcast, Tighe shared some praise for the player, saying that he thinks the Palace man is “pretty good” and he shared some surprise over “how little he’s been used” at the beginning of the campaign.
However, Collins disagreed with Tighe’s comments on Milivojevic and he shared a much more critical assessment of the £14.4m-rated Eagles midfielder, saying:
“He’s good at dead balls, but I think that Palace fans have started to turn on Luka Milivojevic a little bit, because he’s actually really slow, slows the game down a lot, commits quite a lot of fouls and basically, is only in for his dead-ball ability at times.
“I think that the reason we haven’t seen much of him this year is because people have started to work that out.”
Do you agree with what Collins had to say about Milivojevic?
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TIF Thoughts on what Collins had to say about Milivojevic…
It’s clear from what Collins had to say that he isn’t a massive fan of Milivojevic and it also seems as though he is of the belief that a portion of Eagles fans also have their issues with the 29-year-old.
However, given that the midfielder struggled with his fitness towards the end of last season and he was said to have had fitness issues earlier on in the current campaign, perhaps Milivojevic’s fitness has played a larger role than Collins acknowledged in his absence from the team at the start of this season.
The Serbia international’s only league start of the season came in Palace’s 2-1 win over Fulham last weekend and according to WhoScored, he earned the lowest overall rating of any outfield Palace player to have started that game.
So, it will be interesting to see if Milivojevic gets dropped from the starting lineup on Friday versus Wolverhampton Wanderers due to his performance versus Fulham, which might indicate that Roy Hodgson does have concerns over his ability, or if he remains in Hodgson’s starting XI, which might give us more of an indication that the Palace boss is confident in the player’s ability despite last weekend’s performance and may suggest that his absence from the starting XI earlier this term was mainly due to his fitness issues.