Crystal Palace manager Roy Hodgson has delivered his verdict on the Eagles' January transfer window, revealing his disappointment with a lack of arrivals along with an explanation of the deals that did and didn't happen.
Hodgson has steered Palace to 14th in the Premier League, six points clear of the relegation zone, but the south London outfit
“Signing players is not an easy thing to do. Going out and throwing a lot of money around is an easy thing to do, and we have got lots of examples of it.
“But I think we know, as a football club, that we need to make more inroads into improving our squad and rejuvenating our squad, and bringing in some fresh faces.
“An awful lot of the faces I see every day are the same faces I have seen every day since I came to the club and inherited them, so everyone is on the same page as far as that is concerned."
“There was a discussion several weeks, or ten days before the transfer window closed, that Hull might be considering loaning him for a period of time, with an option to buy, and that interested us.
“But there was never any question that we would go in and buy him outright.
"So, if I had kept him [Wickham] back to keep up the numbers and be covered, if we really are unlucky and get two or three people going down, I might have given him another five or six months without the chance to play."
The 72-year-old added: "The opportunity came up for him to go to a Championship club, a good Championship club, where I am hoping that he won’t just train with them every day, but he will get into the team and start to do well, and then hopefully, because he is still a Crystal Palace player, we might see the Connor Wickham that people may have seen four years ago.
“Unfortunately, in the time I have been here, I haven’t seen that, because most of his time has been ruined by injury."
Source : 90min