Roy Hodgson has lavished praise on Nottingham Forest counterpart Steve Cooper ahead of their meeting at Selhurt Road tomorrow.
The Crystal Palace manager goes into what will be his 400th match in the Premier League, looking to build on last weekend’s victory over Manchester United.
Palace left Old Trafford with a 1-0 victory that has put them ninth in the table, three points and three places above tomorrow’s visitors. For their part Forest go into the game on the back of a 1-1 draw with Brentford and looking for their second away win of the season.
They do so seemingly ahead of the pack in their bid to progress away from the bottom quarter of the table and another season of battling relegation. That said, Hodgson believes Cooper did well to keep Forest in the top flight in their first campaign back for more than two decades.
Indeed the veteran ex-England boss admires what the 43-year-old has achieved so far and told the club website: “He’s done a wonderful job. He worked with a friend of mine, Keith Downing, to win that [Under-17s] World Cup [in 2017] and he did a wonderful job with the FA.
“Since leaving that FA job behind to come into senior football at Nottingham Forest, it’s been nothing but success all the way. One can only admire that and congratulate him on that success that he’s had.
“Now he’s in Premier League football like the rest of us, I’m sure the early successes with England are just a happy memory.”
Hodgson is wary of Forest and also of the risk of complacency, the assumption that if they can win at United, they can beat the Reds at home. Hodgson continued: “We’ve got to beat Nottingham Forest first and that’s a serious challenge, irrespective of what we’ve done up to this point.
“We have a lot of respect for them, we know that they’re a good team, and we know that they’re going to be very, very hard to beat. I think that’s one of the easiest traps for a football team to fall into: when you get a good result away from home that people don’t expect, you then automatically assume a team more in your ballpark is going to be easy meat.
“That certainly isn’t our way of thinking. We’re concerned about the threat they’re going to pose and about the fact we’d have liked a stronger group of players to get us through that game. It’s not the XI I put out onto the field that concerns me as much, it’s that we don’t have anybody really senior [on the bench] to help us out as the game goes on.”
