Roy Hodgson 'proud' of Crystal Palace after Manchester City draw

Sunday 31 December 2017 16:02, UK

Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson says he was very proud of his side's performance against Manchester City, despite missing the chance to win the match from the spot late on.

Luca Milivojevic's penalty in injury-time was stopped by Ederson's legs, meaning the points were shared at Selhurst Park, ending City's 18-match winning run in the process.

"I'm very pleased and proud of the performance. I thought it was excellent in terms of their commitment, focus and determination. You only need to fall asleep for a brief moment against this team and they will punish you," Hodgson said.

"Before we would have been jumping through hoops to get a point. But when you miss a penalty, there is always an element of sadness.

"At a moment like this, it's better to focus on how well we played and give the players an enormous pat on the back."

It is the second time in recent games that Palace have had a late penalty saved in order to miss out on a win, following Christian Benteke's late spot-kick failure in the 2-2 draw with Bournemouth.

"If we're brutally honest, with five or six minutes to go, we were making sure we were holding on to our point and could have won it, it was an opportunity which came which was a great bonus with the penalty.

"But, like the Bournemouth game where Wilfried has done brilliantly well to win it, but unfortunately we didn't take advantage."

Wilfried Zaha was once again Palace's most dangerous player going forward and was the player to earn the late penalty, leaving Hodgson further impressed.

"Wilf was very good. He puts in one excellent performance after another. The question is how long can he keep this going. It amazes me. I hope for the fans and the football club that he can keep it going."

Palace had both Scott Dann and Jason Puncheon both stretchered off after injuring themselves while committing fouls on City players.

"We've lost Scott Dann and Jason Puncheon so I'm afraid that we've stretched our resources to the limit," he said. "You don't know directly how bad it is after the game and the doctors loathe to make any bold statements but it [Dann's injury] doesn't look good.

"It looks like a serious knee injury, but how serious it turns out to be after he has the scan, we will have to wait and see.

"We are massively stretched going forward because Mamadou Sakho has been out now for a month and is likely to be out for a few more weeks to come with a quite serious injury, and Joel Ward is still recovering and there's no sign of him doing that in the next few days.

"We will recover one or two players who were unable to play today before the Southampton game, but after an effort like this you'd wish we could make the amount of changes that Manchester City feel they can always make when you look at the quality of the players they have who aren't playing."