ROY Hodgson says it isn’t clear yet how serious Tyrick Mitchell’s injury is after defender was forced off after 29 minutes in tonight’s 2-0 home defeat to Bournemouth.
The left-back made way for Nathaniel Clyne just four minutes after Marcos Senesi had put the Cherries in front and becomes the latest in a series of Palace players to face a spell in the treatment room this season.
That has inevitably had an impact on the club’s poor start to the campaign in front of their own fans, with Keiffer Moore adding a second in stoppage time to leave the Eagles with just one solitary win in SE25 so far.
Asked to provide an assessment on the seriousness of Mitchell’s problem, Hodgson replied: “We don’t know yet.
“It was an unfortunate injury to a player who’s in good form and playing well.
“We’d be very upset to lose him, but it’s a muscle strain.”
Palace’s relatively good away form means they are still nine points above the relegation zone, so nobody will be pressing the panic button just yet despite the tame display against Bournemouth.
Things aren’t about to get any easier for Hodgson’s out of sorts side, with Liverpool visiting Selhurst on Saturday lunchtime before a daunting looking trip to Man City the following weekend.
But experienced club captain Joel Ward is convinced there is nothing to fear having been there and done it all before.
He told Palace TV: “When you’re coming up against those two teams in the next two fixtures, it’s never going to be easy.
“But I think the Premier League is the most-watched league in the world because it’s the most competitive.
“We can go there, or we can be here, and get a result. We’ve done it before and we can do it again.”
Ward also once again reiterated the point he has previously made about bad runs being part and parcel of top flight life.
He said: “We dust ourselves down.
“It’s frustrating when you go through periods like this, but we have to show our togetherness and keep moving forward.
“You go through periods in football when it’s like this, especially in the Premier League.
“The only people who can put that right is ourselves – and we’ll make sure we’re working as hard as we can do on the training pitch to get that momentum back into games.”
Ward added: “We know what we need to do – we need to stick together and do better, first and foremost, and we need to collectively continue to strive to raise the bar and results are going to come.
“We’ve got the talent in the team – we just need to continue to work towards putting everything together.
“Once that clicks, we’ve shown what we can do in previous years.”
