\n<\/p>\n
Adam Wharton was the star of the show as Oliver Glasner gave Crystal Palace fans the perfect parting gift by leading the Londoners to a fully deserved 1-0 victory over Rayo Vallecano in the final of the Conference League on Wednesday night. Right from the first whistle, Wharton had the look of a man determined to make a mockery of Thomas Tuchel’s decision to leave him out of the England squad for this summer’s World Cup in North America.<\/p>\n
The much-coveted midfielder played one superb pass after another before sending a wonderfully-weighted lofted ball into the area just before the break that Tyrick Mitchell somehow managed to head wide from roughly six yards out.<\/span><\/p>\n However, when Wharton strode forward early in the second half to try his luck from distance, Rayo goalkeeper Augusto Batalla could only parry the 22-year-old’s well-struck shot into the path of Jean-Philippe Mateta, who did well to react quickly and deflect the ball home with his calf. <\/span><\/p>\n Palace really should have won the game more comfortably, with Yeremy Pino hitting both posts with a fantastic free-kick before setting up Mateta for a chance that the Frenchman should have buried. <\/span><\/p>\n However, Glasner’s men weren’t punished for their profligacy by a blunt Rayo attack and thus held on to lift their first European trophy – a year after beating Manchester City in the FA Cup final to claim their first domestic title.<\/span><\/p>\n Below, <\/span>GOAL<\/strong><\/b> rates all of the Palace players on show at the Red Bull Arena…<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Adam Wharton was the star of the show as Oliver Glasner gave Crystal Palace fans…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12945,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}