Sage dead bats the concerns at Palace as Prem's traditional sack season approaches
His short tenure has been far from disastrous up to now, but there is little doubt that the heat is on for Pierre Sage after a troubling home defeat to fellow strugglers Newcastle United.
Sunday afternoon's 2-0 defeat to the Magpies at Selhurst Park leaves the Eagles one point and one place above the relegation trapdoor and having to mix the demands of chasing Premier League points with keeping up a Europa League challenge is proving tricky to say the least.
First among many levels of concern for the former Lens boss is his side's inability to stem the flow of goals being conceded. Its now 19 in eight league games with just one clean sheet from the 0-0 draw at Leeds a couple of weeks ago.
Can Sage really be blamed when he inherited a team that had sold its best defenders - Marc Guehi and Maxence Lacroix - and shipped off one of their biggest attacking threats in wing back Daniel Munoz?
Head coaches are often just the scapegoats rather than the architects of a fall, but it is easy to imagine Sage taking the rap if the run of five defeats in the opening eight games gets much worse - and a trip to a revived Spurs next weekend may have come at the worst possible moment.
The man himself sounded realistic rather than defiant when quizzed about this latest defeat for the Eagles - their third at home this season.
"The pressure is normal because we don't have the results." Sage said. "For the moment we don't have what we expect but inside [the club] we are just focused on the solutions - how to be better, how to create the conditions to compete. We will continue our work.
"I always expected to do better. The game of football is not perfect because there are a lot of mistakes from coaches which are not in line with what is [needed]. It's always a frustration when you don't achieve perfection - and you have to be perfect to win.
"But in my position I just start to create the conditions to be close to perfection with the team in concentration and the way of defending and the way of attacking. For the moment, we miss really our game in Brighton [a 5-0 loss last week] but today we missed only 15 minutes and it was sufficient for our opponent to win."
Sage added: "At the moment every period when we are not at our standards, we pay, and my job is to come back to the good things and try to do it every day.
"It's normal that people lose patience when you lose because everybody wants to win but I don't have to convince the people around the club, I just have to convince the players to do their best and to compete and to continue their improvement.
"For me, the noise around the team, the noise around the club is only noise.
"I've spoken to the chairman but only about the game today and how we intended to play our game plan to compete. I shared the strategy with him and the technical staff. It's normal.
"But I think today was not a technical problem but probably a mental one because when we came back for the second half from the dressing room, we left too much to our opponent."
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