Roy Hodgson unsure on Wilfried Zaha return after international break

Roy Hodgson had no answer for Wilfried Zaha's chances of returning from a hamstring injury after the international break.

The Ivory Coast dangerman sat out Crystal Palace's 2-1 defeat at Watford in the FA Cup quarter-finals on Saturday, in a game where the Eagles struggled to create chances.

After the game, Hodgson lamented the loss of Palace's prime attacking threat, and questioned whether it might have made the difference in a tight game at Vicarage Road.

He said: "He's an outstanding player, when you take players of that quality in a team you're not going to be able to say you didn't miss them, you never know what sort of game they're going to have.

"We don't really want to go into an important quarter-final without players of his ability and his importance. So that was a bit unfortunate as, of course, has been the Mamadou Sakho injury.

"He (Zaha) felt his hamstring after the Brighton game, he didn't train, during the week we took him out to test it on Thursday but it would have been an enormous risk to play him in the game today and risk more serious injury. We can only hope he'll recover in the two weeks before the next game."

Hodgson felt his side had been undone by a piece of quality in Watford's winning goal 11 minutes from time rather than anything more habitual, and said he had felt confident that his side would go on to win when the scores were level.

He said: "The second-half performance was good. The game was dominated by the weather conditions, as are so many at this time of year, I thought it was a tight encounter.

"You have to weather the storm in the first half, we couldn't get the ball away from the corner flag. But we started to look more dangerous after half-time and when we equalised I was feeling fairly good about the team and our chances of winning."

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