Crystal Palace boss offers detailed explanation on Michael Olise’s playing time after hamstring injury

Roy Hodgson has offered a detailed explanation about the conundrum of Michael Olise’s playing time after the Crystal Palace attacker picked up a hamstring injury in the 3-1 win over Brentford last time out.

The 22-year-old picked up the problem towards the end of Palace’s Premier League win over the Bees, pulling up and signalling to the bench that he needed to come off.

Olise had started the previous three games and completed the full 90 minutes in each outing. The former Reading winger has just nine appearances to his name this season due to a hamstring injury he suffered on international duty with France’s U21 side last summer.

He was forced to have surgery on the injury and missed the first 11 games of the 2023-24 season.

Olise scored a brace against Brentford, with Eberechi Eze scoring the other goal, as Palace picked up their first win in eight Premier League games.

Hodgson confirmed in his pre-Everton FA Cup press conference that Olise would miss the game and he did not want to put a timeframe on his return.

Palace’s next Premier League game will take place on January 20 after tomorrow’s FA Cup outing.

“This has got nothing to do with the (previous injury). It’s much lower down (his hamstring),” Hodgson said of Olise’s injury.  

“So it’s nowhere near where he injured himself – it’s not a recurrence. You’ve got to be careful with players. You’ve got to be more and more careful these days. There are longer periods in the game where there’s inactivity because of VAR and longer matches.

“We’re coming off a period now where we just played three matches in a week for a couple of weeks in succession, so you are aware of all of those things. But the fact is that, unfortunately, you can’t run your team totally scientifically.

“If, for example, someone could have said to me: ‘Michael Olise might pull a muscle in the last couple of minutes of the game, maybe you should pull him off earlier?’ Of course, you would do so without hesitation. 

“But, if suddenly, with say 15 minutes to go and Olise is playing like he’s playing. They put the board up (and it says) Olise off, and Olise comes off and goes: ‘What’s going on? What are you doing? Why are you taking me off? I want to play,’ and the crowd is booing, is that when the sports scientist steps across and says: ‘Well, I told him to do that – I thought it was a good idea.’

“Managers have to win matches. How do you do that? You get yourself a good team, you work together with everybody to try to get the best and to make certain that when the players are on the field they are ready to play, they want to play and they feel fit to play. That’s what we try to do. 

“We haven’t yet got to a stage where the game is completely run by people outside of my aegis where, basically speaking, I go into a game going he will play 40 minutes, he will play 70, he can play 80. What happens if the one playing 80 gets injured after 15 minutes with a pulled muscle?

“Sports science has been very useful to us in terms of analysing what we do in training, the amount of running we do, the dosing of training sessions. It’s very important. making certain when people get injured, they are fit when they get back and ready to play with all the processes they go through. I can’t speak highly enough of it.

“But I find it harder to think that we are going to get to a stage where we can definitely compute how long people can play.

“When you get to that stage then the public are going to need a lot of education because, otherwise, they’re not going to really understand why players they really want to see play are being replaced by a player who in their eyes is a much lesser player and the player coming off is waving their arms in protest. 

“It might be different at the top teams if the player you take off is replaced by another 40, 50 60m start If I take Olise off and put someone on that people they don’t regard as being anywhere near the same level as Olise, I don’t think the crowd or press are going to understand it. They’ll understand it even less if we lose.”

OLISE PICTURE: KEITH GILLARD