Roy Hodgson admits he is surprised at how quickly the Crystal Palace team have responded to his coaching methods, and believes the south Londoners have a great chance of staying in the Premier League this season.
Hodgson was appointed as Frank De Boer's successor in early September and, after just four games in charge, led Palace to a famous victory - their first of the season - against Chelsea at Selhurst Park on Saturday.
After the win over the champions, Hodgson praised the organisation of his team from defence to attack and admitted it took him much longer - months in fact - to get the same sort of results with his Fulham team of 2007/08.
Then, he took over a Fulham side sitting rock bottom in the Premier League standings, as Palace are now. But after recruiting new players in the January window, Hodgson managed to get the team winning games to survive relegation in remarkable fashion.
In Pictures | Crystal Palace vs Chelsea | 14/10/2017
Talking about the much quicker improvement in performances at Palace than at Fulham nearly 10 years ago, Hodgson said: "This has come quicker than I expected.
"It took us a long while to get anything like this sort of team performance at Fulham; we didn't do it after a month. We'd have been into two or three months before we could say, 'Yeah, this is what we want, what we're looking for'.
"Hopefully now the players know that they can do it, because they've done it against the champions, so with 30 games to go, we're never going into a game not feeling that we can get something out of it."
