Suggestion: Ezequiel Garay

Just in case any of the scouts or management at Palace ever have a look in these pages (I doubt it, but you never know.....)

As both a fan of Valencia CF and Crystal Palace, I have long admired our Argentinian central defender Ezequiel Garay.

Firstly, here's some of his defending (and goals) from 2016-2017 at Valencia:


He will be available for free as from tomorrow (I know Benfica want him but no offer has been made official). His contract is not being renewed, mainly because he has been very outspoken against Valencia's management. When the coach that won Valencia the Copa del Rey and got us into the Champions League two seasons in a row, Marcelino, was unceremoniously dumped in the summer and replaced by completely untried yes-man Celades, Garay took to Twitter criticising the Chairman publicly.

Garay was instrumental last summer in the Spanish cup-final, where Valencia beat a full-strength Barcelona. Here's a little video someone made of just Garay's input into that match.

He then, a month ago, completely pilloried the Chairman and his minions on YouTube, after telling them that he did not want his contract renewed this summer. You can use Google to automatically translate the Spanish captions on this YouTube video if you use Chrome by right-clicking on the captions icon.



Tomorrow, the entire Valencia squad have been banned from his goodbye dinner he was putting together for the team (the team love Garay very much, as do the fans). The management said that this was for Covid-19 social distancing, even though the team have been training together for weeks and Garay (who already has had Covid, was the first La Liga player to catch it months ago) had promised social distancing measures.

Garay has been out injured following a knee injury sustained in a match against Celta at the start of the year. He was going to be six months out, which means he should be back to playing for next season. Since next season is likely to start later than usual, what with this season ending later than usual, there is a high likelihood that he'll be fully recovered by September.

So, a goal-scoring solid central defender, would not cost Palace anything in transfer fees, unlikely to demand huge wages because of his current injury and because he is already 33, he would be tremendous and terrifying alongside Sakho, and would partner Cahill well too. Plus, being a Spanish speaker, can maintain clear communication with Guaita too.

I would love to see him at Palace, now that it is impossible that he can remain at my "other" team, Valencia.