Roy Hodgson: It will be 'ludicrous' if Crystal Palace don't sign any new players this January

Roy Hodgson claims it will be "ludicrous" if Crystal Palace don't sign any new players in the January transfer window.

Only Watford, with nine injured players, currently have more players missing from their first team than Hodgson's Eagles, a situation the former England boss described as "the worst injury crisis I've faced in my five decades of football management".

Despite this, his side saw off Burnley with a professional - if somewhat dull - 1-0 victory at Selhurst Park thanks to Bakary Sako's fourth goal in seven games. It's a result that takes Palace up to 12th in the Premier League, just a month after they moved out of the relegation for the first time this season.

Nonetheless, Hodgson remains more concerned with recruitment matters as he looks to bolster his Palace squad.

"There's still only [Christian] Benteke as a centre-forward," he said of his back-up options afterwards. "Sako is doing a good job up there but he wasn't bought as a centre-forward he was bought as a left winger, apart from that we've got Connor Wickham who arguably won't play this season and a young lad from Margate; Freddie Ladapo. That is not a Premier League bench.

"I'm looking at other teams in the Premier League with four or five who are experienced players on the bench with only one playing and four hoping to get a chance. So to say that there's no problem, you can just carry on with you've got, I think that would be ludicrous."

He added: "I would say if anything the fact that we've done well enough to at least pull ourselves up by our boot straps and away from the execution zone will make the owners even more aware that if we are going to stay there we need the help we've talked about right from the very offset. This isn't something we've just started talking about a week ago, this is something we've been planning since September.

"The owners have been on board from the very first day when I came in and had a chance to analyse the squad and they agreed right from the very beginning that for our squad to be one that we need to survive in the Premier League you can't have two goalkeepers, you need three. You can't have one out-and-out centre-forward, you need four really, you certainly need two. And now of course we've had all the injuries which we weren't counting on."

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Scott Dann and Jason Puncheon have notably been ruled out for rest of the season with torn ACLs while the injured Mamadou Sakho, Joel Ward and Andros Townsend aren’t expected to return to action until next month. Loanee Ruben Loftus-Cheek could be available for selection next week but Jeffrey Schlupp won't be seen again until March at the earliest.

When quizzed on reports Palace have beaten Watford to the signing of Getafe's 31-year-old goalkeeper Vicente Guaita, Hodgson claimed nothing had been finalised and that the club "have other goalkeeping targets".

"We've got a goalkeeper who is doing well at the moment and we've got another 39-year-old goalkeeper who's played some games and has been a wonderful club servant," he added. "But we need at least one more goalkeeper so that those players can compete for a place because if one of them gets injured then we've only got one left. I don't know any Premier League club who's [only] got two goalkeepers."