Crystal Palace manager outlines exactly where he wants transfer kitty to be spent

Roy Hodgson has spelled out that Crystal Palace’s sole focus is adding to their attacking options – despite a number of his defenders being doubts for the start of the next Premier League season.

Gary Cahill, Mamadou Sakho, James Tomkins and Patrick van Aanholt are all sidelined.

But Hodgson – speaking ahead of Sunday’s final league game at home to Tottenham – reckons it makes no sense to reinforce that area in the transfer window, which opens at the start of next week.

“These players might be difficult for us to recover for the first game or two but they are going to be there pretty soon after the start of the season,” said the Eagles chief.

“And you don’t want to be signing players really who are not going to get much of a look in because in our centre-back position there will be Scott Dann, Sakho, Tomkins, Gary Cahill and Martin Kelly. To go out and sign another centre-back because three or four of those might be missing is a slightly dangerous thing to do.

“We need to stick to the transfer policy we have, which is that we’ve identified an area of the field – certainly in attack. Also in offensive midfield areas – they are the ones we’ve really highlighted.

“We needed a right-back because we’d never replaced Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Joel Ward has had that position all to himself – we’ve been fortunate he hasn’t gone down injured.

“We’ve solved that problem with the signing of Nathan [Ferguson]. We should concentrate on the areas we’ve been concentrating all along and keep an eye open if there was a good young player we could get at the right price who could be initially a bit of an understudy to these senior players, that would be ideal.”