October 21 2004

Iain Dowie

Palace boss Iain Dowie believes his team will ignore the West Brom bully boys on Saturday and win what he feels is the Eagles "biggest game of the season so far," by Stuart Pink.

The Baggies lie just three points ahead of Palace in the Premiership table, but a second home win on the spin for Dowie's men could see them overtake their relegation rivals and climb out of the bottom three.

But Dowie is optimistic his side can win if they get the ball down and play, and not concentrate on West Brom's physical approach.

Dowie said: "It probably is the biggest game of the season so far, people will read more into it but it's a six pointer, such as it is for the Norwich's and West Brom's, its the same thing.

"We've got to be much braver and get it down and play our game, we're not going to play their game. We'll have to get the full-backs out wide, break early, and we know they will play at times 4-2-4 and play it up to Kanu, but we have to deal with that."

Dowie said Palace were "mugged" the last time the sides met in March when the Baggies won 2-0 at the Hawthorns, and blamed it on poor attacking play from his side.

But Dowie's firepower could be boosted with the return of new signing Sandor Torghelle, who despite not making last week's squad, could figure after impressing in training following his return from international duty with Hungary.

Dowie said: "Sandor had a great spell early on, then his form dipped, and now he looks really sharp in training and physically he is very strong.

"He needs to get used to playing in the Premier League, it's a little bit of a different game than he played in Hungary. I never thought it would go bang and all of a sudden he would be alight, he started in fantastic fashion but it's always going to take time to develop and time to evolve."

Palace expect to have Danny Butterfield back in contention after he completed 90 minutes in the reserves last week and new signing Wayne Andrews has returned to training after a medial ligament problem.

But Neil Shipperley is expected to be out for another four to five months after suffering a reaction to a knee injury after playing alongside Butterfield in Palace's reserve victory against Southampton last week.

Nicola Ventola and Darren Powell are at least one to two weeks away from being considered after respective knee and cheekbone injuries.

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