Roy Hodgson would not claim fatigue was the reason his Crystal Palace side fell to a 2-0 defeat to Southampton on Tuesday night.

The Eagles were outplayed from start to finish at Selhurst Park, with goals from Nathan Redmond and Stuart Armstrong either side of the break earning the Saints a deserved three points.

Hodgson’s men, who picked up an unexpected point at Manchester City just three days ago, looked flat, possibly from their exertions at the Etihad, but the Palace boss refrained from using that as an excuse for defeat.

“They did look tired but we can't use that as an excuse because we had the same rest period as the other teams in the league,” he said.

“It's more we had this period where the same XI basically have had to fight through some tough games.

“It caught up with us a little bit tonight.”

Despite a thin squad to choose from, Hodgson revealed he was more concerned in getting his injured players back rather than delving into the market.

“I'm not thinking of the transfer window.

“It's more about recovering six players, six players is a lot and we're not just talking about six who never play.

“We're talking Benteke, Townsend, Schlupp, Sakho, Van Aanholt and Milivojevic.

“These are all guys who normally play in the team and, if you like, they'll be like new players in the team when they come back because we've been dealing without them for the past four or five weeks.”

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Palace failed to muster a shot on target during the 90 minutes, despite new loan signing Cenk Tosun having a glorious chance early on to put the hosts in front, but blazed his effort wildly over.

Saints were dominant and when Armstrong struck moments after the restart, it was difficult for the most optimistic Palace fan to see a way back against a slick Ralph Hasenhuttle side.

“We did what we could do,” Hodgson added.

“We had three senior players on the bench who have played in the first team before, albeit Connor (Wickham) hasn't played many before.

“We put Connor Wickham on, we put Max Meyer, who has recovered from injury recently, on and we put Joel Ward on, who is returning from injury.

“We did what we could do but the second goal was a massive blow because we had a little half chance before that.

“If we kept it to 1-0 for a longer period of time who knows what could have happened.

“Possibly the ball could have bounced kindly for us or gone our way even without us playing well.

“At 2-0, they already had their tails up and were pretty much in control of the game.

“It was going to be a really hard ask to get those goals to bring us back in the game.

“Quite frankly we never really looked like we would achieve that.”

Victory for Saints sees them leapfrog Palace into ninth, while Hodgson’s men slip to 11th.

Having been dumped out of the FA Cup at the first hurdle by Derby, Palace have a ten day break before they’re back in action when they welcome Sheffield United to Selhurst Park on February 1st.