Roy Hodgson
Crystal Palace boss Roy Hodgson believes that having the ability to make more substitutions will benefit bigger clubs in the Premier League. The decision has been made by Premier League clubs to allow the temporary switch to five substitutions, which will impact Crystal Palace and their top flight rivals when football returns later this month. But the Palace boss believes that while it could help the clubs with bigger squads in the league, he is happy to go along with the decision.
Roy Hodgson said “We aren’t in the upper echelons in that respect, there is no doubt about that, Over the Christmas period we were really down to the bare bones and if we pick up any injuries as could easily happen now in this period of quite intensive training it’ll be even worse for us. But I don’t think one should be moaning or complaining in any way about that because it was so important to get back playing these matches, so important to get the season finished in the right way, not decided by artificial means, not points per game so three teams get relegated without the chance to play football to try and save themselves. Liverpool being maybe handed a title, but they don’t want that, they want to receive the title during a period of time where they are playing football and pick the trophy up. It is not really what necessarily suits us, it is what the people in the league think is best and I am more than happy to go along with it because whatever they say we’ll abide by. It might be the case that we find ourselves a bit short with a couple of players and look at the team we are playing against, look a bit enviously towards the bench that they have, but the great thing is that we are going to be playing and have the opportunity to look enviously at their bench because there was a period of time where it didn’t look like we would be able to do that at all.”
