Wilfried Zaha says his hamstring injury is improving slowly, with the attacker expected to miss Crystal Palace’s clash against rivals Brighton on Monday evening. Zaha suffered the problem in the 2-1 win over Newcastle at St James’ Park at the start of the month, so far missing both of the losses against Leeds and Burnley.
Wilfried Zaha said: “It’s getting there. It feels a lot better than before but there’s a lot of rehab I need to do in the gym. It’s slowly getting there.”
Roy Hodgson had stated in his press conference earlier on Thursday that he is hoping the 28-year-old will return sooner than hoped, but admitted Zaha is still struggling.
Roy Hodgson said: “He is still suffering from the injury, there’s no question of that. The doctors in particular and physios are very anxious to not put dates on people so they’d be very angry with me if I suggested dates he could return. He’s working very hard to get back as soon as he can. I’m rather hoping the prognosis will be different to the actual timescale.”
Hodgson also revealed that another two players have been suffering with injuries this week at Palace, but James McCarthy has returned to training.
Roy Hodgson added: “James McCarthy trained today which is very positive. So we’ll see how he trained through that. A couple of others picked up slight knocks that we need to keep an eye on – we don’t know how well they’ll recover. Certainly there won’t be a vast difference from the last couple of games and if we’re really unlucky it could be worse. Two players are suffering from knocks and we’re monitoring them.
