Crystal Palace Boss Roy Hodgson Praises His Side's Determination After Second Half Comeback

Southampton squandered the lead at St. Mary's against a dogged Crystal Palace outfit on Tuesday night, as the away side fought to turn the tide with second half goals from James McArthur and Luka Milivojevic.

The hard fought victory ensured the Eagles went above their opponents on the day, on what can only be described as a well deserved victory.

Speaking in Palace's post-match press conference (via Crystal Palace Official) a delighted Hodgson revealed:

"In the first we looked like a team that had a very tough game a couple of days ago and the pitch was a little but heavy as there has been a lot of rain and the grass was a little bit long, so that didn’t help the ball to fizz across the surface."

The ex-England manager jested: "The programme has been exceptionally unkind to us and I hope it doesn’t happen every year. To get four points from the Arsenal, Man City and Southampton games which were played in five days, that’s not a bad performance by anyone’s standards."

"For any team in this league, if you can look back at the past 11 games and have only lost one of them to Arsenal at home, then you have to be satisfied. It’s an incredible achievement for the players to have got ourselves into a group of teams that could possibly be relegated, rather than propping up the whole league when most experts said we’d never recover.

"When you start so low in the league as we’ve done, you’ve got to be even more satisfied. I think I set high standards and demands but these players are happy to meet them."

When asked about Milivojevic's revival after the squandered penalty against Manchester City, the manager said: "It’s nice for him and I’m sure he was disappointed to miss it. It would have been nice to have won that game but if we had, we might have lost today so we would have one less point."

"The thing about penalty misses is that everyone automatically assumes you’re going to score and when you don’t people take it badly, but when players miss sitters in front of goal that should be definitely scored, they get a momentary remark and then it’s forgotten about. 

"Wilf missed an open goal against Tottenham but I bet you don’t remember it."