Hodgson on the Selhurst Park Redevelopment and on Tottenham

Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson lent his support to the potential redevelopment of Selhurst Park.

Economic development and regeneration consultancy, Regeneris Consultancy highlighted the positive impact the redevelopment would have on the borough and the people of South London as a whole.

As well as raising the stadium capacity to around 34,000, it would also increase the number of full time, part time and matchday jobs by around 70%, thus providing more jobs for the local community.

The former England manager said, “I can only see positives towards it of course and I’m hoping of course that the people in the local area will back it because I don’t really see that they’ve got anything to lose as such.

“It will provide jobs of course, and it would certainly improve the vista in that part of Thornton Eve because it would look like a very, very nice stadium.”

He also stated, “It will give us a little bit more capacity, which is nice it won’t be enormous but it will be that extra, 8000 which is quite considerable.

“It will give us the income that we need to try and keep the club at the level we want to keep it at, so I’m 100% behind it myself and I’m hoping the local people will be behind it too.”

Palace currently sit 15th in the Premier League and take on Champion’s League Chasers Tottenham on the Sunday Lunchtime clash.

However, they are currently missing 12 players through injury, including Wilfried Zaha and Chelsea Loanee Ruben Loftus Cheek.

When asked about the high injury list, the former Fulham and Liverpool boss said, “It’s getting that bit harder because when you take people out like Zaha, Loftus Cheek, Jeffrey Schlupp and Mamadou Sakho out of the team, obviously you know you can’t pretend that you are as strong as perhaps you were because we are talking about four real good quality players and that’s not without mentioning one or two others that we’ve lost along the way.”

“I still think that you won’t see the best of us for probably for another few weeks, until at least some of those players get back and up and running, but we are going to be working very hard in those couple of weeks to make certain that the gap between what we think is our best and what we are doing now is not that wide.”

The Eagles are winless in their last four league matches, while their opponents Tottenham are unbeaten in 9 league games, but did draw 2-2 against league 1 minnows Rochdale in the FA Cup recently.