Despite the impending sense of doom at Crystal Palace, Roy Hodgson is refusing to lose his cool

The 70-year-old hinted a few weeks back that if he steers Palace to safety it will be one of his proudest achievements in his long managerial career

Roy Hodgson is remaining calm: 'There's no point in being otherwise' (Getty)

It should have been the season that Crystal Palace kicked on and built upon four years of Premier League survival. Instead, as the final 11 games of the season approach, the Eagles once again find themselves embroiled in a relegation battle.

That’s five seasons since winning promotion back to the top flight in 2013 and five successive fights to avoid a return to the Championship. Palace will be eager to point out it’s five successful battles against the drop - and history suggests they will do the same again this season - but it doesn’t make for the most enjoyable existence as an Eagles fans.

So many things have gone wrong this season the most pessimistic of supporters might start to think the club is cursed: countless injuries to important first-team players; two terrible transfer windows; the disastrous Frank de Boer experiment; and yet Palace are still three or four wins away from avoiding the drop again.

Manager Roy Hodgson certainly thinks his team have been unfortunate when it comes to injuries, with Mamadou Sakho’s calf problem two days before Saturday’s trip to Everton taking the number of Palace players in a packed treatment room to 10 - almost enough to field an entire side.

“We certainly haven't had anything given to us,” he said after Saturday’s 3-1 defeat at Goodison Park, where right-back Tim Fosu-Mensah had to fill in at centre-back in Sakho’s absence.

“We certainly haven't had any fortune to lose as many players as we've had. That's not exactly the good fortune you need when you have a very limited squad of players but we are fully aware that we are one of the teams that are going to have to fight relegation this year and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that we'll get dragged into the bottom three again but we've got out of it in the past and hopefully we'll be getting players fitter.

“As far as we are concerned we will just keep battling away, keep working away. That's what we've done so far and I don't see any reason to change it. We don't have anything up our sleeve to change it, there is no magic recipe.”

Sakho joined Scott Dann, Jason Puncheon, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Jeffrey Schlupp, Julian Speroni, Martin Kelly and Connor Wickham on the treatment table; all players who could legitimately argue to be first-teamers. And while Hodgson expects Sakho to be back in training next week and available for Palace’s next game against Tottenham, it is Wilfried Zaha who is the most high profile absentee, sitting out with a knee injury for the second time this season.

Mamadou Sakho is the latest Palace player to have been struck down with injury (Getty)

The Eagles have failed to win a league match without their talismanic No 11 since September 2016, and they certainly missed his ingenuity during his eight-week spell on the sidelines at the start of this season. But the uncomfortable truth is that for the past few weeks Zaha has not recreated the sort of form everyone at the club knows he can deliver. When he returned against Chelsea in October he inspired a famous victory over the Blues and was unplayable for the next two months. Palace will be hoping he does the same when he comes back from this latest setback in a few weeks.

It’s got to the point where getting through a game without any more injuries to key men has almost become the main aim, especially as Palace’s next three fixtures are against Tottenham, Manchester United and Chelsea, meaning by the time they travel to Huddersfield in the middle of March they could easily be back in the bottom three for the first time since December.

Then there’s Christian Benteke’s terrible season. The £28m Belgian scored 17 goals in his debut campaign at Palace but has managed just two so far this season, and none at Selhurst Park. “He just needs that ball to drop for him," says Hodgson.

"If he'd have scored one of those headers [against Everton] or the ball had dropped to him a bit more kindly and he'd have got a goal. What he's got to do is keep making certain that if the goals aren't coming for him he's doing something else to help the team and help us get results and points because although he hasn't score as much in recent games he has played a part.”

Despite all this, and almost certainly thanks to four decades of experience in the game, Hodgson is remaining calm. “There's no point in being otherwise,” he added. “There's no point in panicking. I think the panic was after seven games [when Palace had zero points] I think we've moved away from that. We've shown we can do it, we've shown we can get away from it, we've shown we have the ability in the team, I think we've shown we've got the fighting spirit in the team as well.


 Hodgson is keeping calm at Palace despite the impending sense of doom 
 (Getty)

“I suppose I will start panicking when we get to a situation where there's not enough games left for us to get the necessary number of points, but I don't blame the players in any way. I don't think I've got any reason to criticise their effort, their determination or their desire. It just so happens that the one or two defensive mistakes that we made were punished.

“I think that if someone had said to me [back in September] that in early February we'd be two points above the relegation zone I'd have laughed in their face.”

The 70-year-old hinted a few weeks back that if he steers Palace to safety it will be one of his proudest achievements in his long managerial career. Given the seven-game head-start the Eagles handed their relegation rivals, their underwhelming transfer business and the club’s severely depleted squad, if Hodgson does keep the side up it may just be the greatest of ‘Great Escapes’ seen in south London.