Roy Hodgson has warned his Crystal Palace players against complacency after watching a team who had made the worst start to a top-flight season clamber out of the relegation zone for the first time, and for at least 24 hours, with a dramatic late comeback against Watford.
Goals from the substitutes Bakary Sako and James McArthur secured an unlikely 2-1 win and extended Palace’s unbeaten run to six matches, hoisting them out of the bottom three and depositing West Bromwich Albion below the cut-off before Wednesday’s fixtures.
Hodgson insisted he had never doubted his players’ ability to recover from losing their first seven games without scoring a goal but even with Wilfried Zaha’s form irrepressible, he envisages more tricky days ahead.
“This was a huge three points and where we are in the table, you have to work unbelievably hard for every win,” said the former England manager whose side will be without Timothy Fosu-Mensah at Leicester on Saturday, after he picked up a hamstring injury . “The moment we think our problems are over is the moment our problems will begin. While it’s wonderful to win this match, we’re still very close to the bottom of the table. We haven’t quite made up from getting zero points from the first seven games.
“For a good period going forward, we’re going to be in or around the relegation zone. One week we’ll be in it, the next we’ll be out of it. But if we can at least continue to show the fight …
“We [the coaching staff] never felt this was a hopeless case, even after we lost our first three games in charge. From the moment I started working with the players I found a group willing to buy into the type of work ethic and philosophy that we, as coaches, share. They were just saying to us: ‘Give us some guidance as to how you want the instruments to play, and we’ll become an orchestra.’”
Watford’s manager, Marco Silva, refused to blame the loss on Tom Cleverley, despite his dismissal in the 87th minute. “We should have won,” he said. “When you play like we did for 85 minutes – we were leading 1-0 but we must score more. The red card changed it. It gave them belief.”
