Crystal Palace 0 Southampton 1: Roy Hodgson loses first game in charge as hosts set two unwanted records

The England manager is, in this era when the Premier League runs football, as much diplomat as he is coach, knowing that everything he says echoes back to the clubs that control the show and when Roy Hodgson did that job, he understood very quickly where the power resided.

As Crystal Palace manager, he is liberated from those restrictions and it quickly became evident as he spoke after his new team’s fifth straight opening-run defeat – a record in the top flight going all the way back to the beginning of league football – that Hodgson is going to speak his mind now. He has inherited a basket case of a team that have not scored a single goal yet, never mind put a point on the board, and their new manager will not worry how he tells it or to whom he says it.

He talked frankly of more pain to come with a run of league fixtures that sees them play away at Manchester City and Manchester United and then back at Selhurst Park against Chelsea. He warned that in the training sessions that were to come he would not be able to “produce three or four Messis and Ronaldos in the next two or three months”. In fact all he could promise was lots of hard work and a good deal more suffering before things got better.

The evidence over the course of the first half at least, when Steven Davis gave Southampton a sixth-minute lead, was compelling and Hodgson did not try to sweeten the pill. This is a Palace team that is bereft of confidence and struggled to apply any pressure, other than a couple of moments inspired by their best attacking player, the Chelsea loanee Ruben Loftus-Cheek who was a rare ray of light among the gloom.

Hodgson is back at Selhurst Park on Tuesday for the third-round Carabao Cup tie with Huddersfield Town, although by now Palace’s season has already reached emergency levels with the very real prospect that they could go eight games without a point. He acknowledged that “sometimes strange things happen” but he knows that the destiny of Palace’s season will be decided by games like the last two in October, away at Newcastle and then home to West Ham.

His job as England manager did not bring him to Selhurst Park that often but the team that played there in the home shirts will have been unrecognisable to their new manager for long periods of the game. They were benign for much of it with Christian Benteke chasing shadows and Andros Townsend rarely unleashed upon the Southampton defence who looked comfortable throughout.

The new manager was well-received at the beginning which will have been reassuring having emerged from 15 months of isolation post-England. His substitution of Loftus-Cheek was booed by the home support but the 21-year-old had, Hodgson said, been suffering from cramp having only just recovered from injury and his replacing was judged to be unavoidable.

It will be Loftus-Cheek and the likes of Townsend who Hodgson has to rely upon to try to get Palace out of relegation, as well as Wilfried Zaha, still injured, and new signing Mamadou Sakho who is not yet fit. Hodgson also has to locate the soul of this team, lost during the short-lived Frank de Boer era, the essence of Palace that make them such a hard-working, intense team to play against at Selhurst Park where they have already dropped nine points against non-elite opposition.

The “nervosity”, as described by Hodgson, always capable of identifying the right word for the occasion, was telling from the start. “I thought in the first half it was far too obvious that the tactic was to try and hit long balls up to Benteke and get knockdowns,” he said. “That didn't produce any real rewards... in the second half we were prepared to put our foot on the ball and pass it from time to time.”

It is a pure kind of challenge for a football manager – no transfer window to rely upon, a strange unbalanced squad and a severe shortage of points inherited from the previous incumbent. Hodgson will have no option but to coach his way out of this one. Then there is that other unquantifiable element, the worry that this is a team who are already imagining themselves relegated. “Psychologically we have got a fight on our hands,” he said, “but we will take that fight on.”

A very different story for Mauricio Pellegrino whose own team have been less than impressive over the start of the season, especially in their 2-0 home defeat to Watford the previous weekend. The Argentinian manager of Southampton needed a victory – perhaps not as much as Palace, but he needed it nonetheless ahead of the visit of Manchester United to St Mary’s next weekend.

His team looked well-drilled and the early Davis goal, after Wayne Hennessey saved from Dusan Tadic, helped settle them down. The outstanding performance was in midfield from Mario Lemina, the club’s £15.4 million record signing from Juventus who dominated that area of the pitch. There was also a fine performance from the 23-year-old Dutch defender Wesley Hoedt.

Late in the game he was joined by Virgil van Dijk, the Southampton captain who spent the summer so bitterly at odds with his club and is now in the last stages of his rehabilitation. He was welcomed back warmly by the Saints fans in South London and although the transfer request of early August, accompanied by a long list of grievances, will always be on his record it seems that his club’s stance has prevailed in the end.

“We have to accept that everybody can express themselves on the pitch,” Pellegrino said. “Around the player there is a lot of interest. You know how it works by now, it is a big business behind them … we have to accept that.”

No Premier League manager, however, has problems to compare to Hodgson’s who faces them with the fatalism that has served him well over more than four decades in the game, although he will know that this is as tough a hand as he has been dealt.