a sign of panic at Selhurst Park or back to the future?

Crystal Palace have brought Roy Hodgson back for the rest of their increasingly turbulent season, but is this a return to the familiar or a panic decision?

It doesn’t take much to imagine the look of surprise on Roy Hodgson’s face when the telephone rang. “Hello Roy, it’s Steve here. We’ve got ourselves into a bit of a pickle and could do with a helping hand.” And so it was that, in a season of managerial merry-go-rounds, perhaps the most surprising return of the season of all came to pass. Hodgson is back at Selhurst Park, and his mission is about as straightforward as they come: he needs to keep Crystal Palace in the Premier League.

Since the start of the year, Palace’s position has been quietly diminishing despite the team remaining in the same position in the table. Slowly but surely over the course of the last two-and-a-half months, any comfort has been slowly chipped away. On January 4, a 4-0 home defeat at the hands of Tottenham Hotspur – yes, that’s how long ago that was – nudged Palace down a place to 12th in the Premier League table, just as they finished last season.

They’ve been there ever since, but the scenery all looks very different now. The five-point buffer between them and 13th-placed Leicester City has evaporated. Palace are now only separated from the bottom of the table by four points, and they’re the only team in the Premier League not to have won a single game in 2023. Seldom has a league position felt so tenuous, so likely to deteriorate in the very near future.

But despite atrocious form and the recruitment shortfall which has left their first-team squad looking unbalanced after a failure to signifcantly strengthen in January and shorn of confidence, the decision to sack Patrick Vieira was enough of a surprise to feel like an act of desperation. To make such a decision in the middle of March, long after the January transfer window has shut and with the season starting to hit its final sprint… it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was a decision fuelled by a sense of panic rather than strategic thinking.

The suggestion that Hodgson could return to the club initially seemed to be regarded as some light tabloid froth, a little bit of speculation to fill a few column inches, but the confirmation of his appointment at least gives him the opportunity to bed himself back in before the team returns to action on – uh-oh – April 1 with a home game against Leicester City.

It’s likely…