Crystal Palace defeated Tottenham Hotspur 1-0 at White Hart Lane to set up an FA Cup quarter-final clash with Reading and manager Alan Pardew said that the lessons his side learned from previous meetings with Spurs helped them massively.

Palace lost 1-0 to Spurs at White Hart Lane in September and also suffered a 3-1 defeat at home in January and Pardew said that he made changes to his side based on the back of lessons learned from those two games and evidently they worked on Sunday.

Speaking after the game, Pardew spoke about the major alterations he made to his line-up.

As reported by ESPN , Pardew said:

We learned some lessons from the two Tottenham games before. We changed the shape so we didn’t get pushed back so far, but in doing that we had to release our full-backs to get forward. To get that goal from a full-back shows the kind of intent that we had.

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Palace started with a traditional 4-4-2 formation, something they’ve worked on whilst at their warm-weather training camp in Spain during the week. The presence of both Emmanuel Adebayor and Connor Wickham in attack kept Spurs deeper in defence, but it also meant that Joel Ward and Martin Kelly had to push on in attack and it was the latter’s bursting run at the end of the first half that was rewarded with a goal.

It’s fair to say, the planning worked well!