England rugby head coach Eddie Jones visited Crystal Palace on Thursday to give Alan Pardew's team a motivational talk for a season run-in that concludes with the FA Cup final.
Palace face Manchester United at Wembley Stadium on May 21, but before then have a further three Premier League fixtures that could yet end with them in the bottom three.
Even though it would take an unlikely run of results to relegate them, a return to the Championship remains a mathematical possibility, and in an attempt to maintain his team's focus for Saturday's trip to his former club Newcastle, Pardew invited Jones to share his experiences with Palace's players.
"We're still not mathematically safe in the Premier League, so we still have work to do, which is why I asked Eddie Jones to come in, and he had a few words with the team about complacency and about what teams do," Pardew said of Jones -- who managed Japan at last year's Rugby World Cup and has subsequently led England to the Grand Slam having been appointed by the RFU after their World Cup failure.
"He's been involved in World Cups with other nations, a multicultural personality, someone who is engaging. If they can't take on board his comments then we're in trouble.
"We share a couple of professional friends. Jeremy Snape [Palace's sports psychologist] is one of those.
"We've been quite close since he's been here, and a lot of the views he has on trying to get more from individual players and the group run parallel with my own. Trying to get the best out of his ideas is nice for me.
"It was nice to have him here -- good timing, what with the result we had [defeating Watford 2-1 in Sunday's semifinal]."
Victory for Palace at St James' Park would edge Newcastle even closer to relegation and confirm Palace's Premier League status for another year, just 17 months after Pardew left Newcastle to join Palace at a time when the Magpies appeared reasonably strong.
For all that he was an unpopular figure on Tyneside, the manager insists he is "desperate" to see Newcastle survive, and believes they are an improving team again under Rafael Benitez.
"They are a much stronger team," Pardew said. "Rafa is a very experienced manager who has managed at the top of the game. He's got them in a much better place to win this game, and that worries me because my job is to win this game.
"The club is a beast when it's going well, but it can be equally as destructive when things aren't going well. At the moment things are going well, so it's a big bear we'll have to fight."