It might not be Total Football, but Roy Hodgson won't let Crystal Palace down

Roy Hodgson will see the Crystal Palace job as a chance for him to go out on a high.

He is 70 now and if he can keep them up and stabilise them, then he will feel like he can finish on a positive note after the England job hurt his reputation a little bit.

Roy is a safe pair of hands in many respects. He is very good at setting up a team in a way that makes them difficult to beat.

Some people call that negative, but most of his jobs in the Premier League have been with teams who need help - and first he has to get that right.

He will not care about being pragmatic or playing a certain way to get the job done. He will get Palace playing more like the way they have been used to. He is someone who likes to play good football, but he is aware that is secondary to getting results.

It will probably not be that pretty at times and the football is not necessarily going to be free-flowing in the beginning. But what Palace fans can expect is a team who are really well organised, one that works hard and will, hopefully, grow in confidence.

What Roy did at Fulham was remarkable and what he did at West Brom was remarkable.

Yes, the Liverpool year was awful for him, but there were lots of mitigating factors there.

Any manager who fails with England - especially losing to Iceland, that was a catastrophe - hurts your reputation. But he is not the first England manager to have been let down by his players.

So I am pleased to see him back in management because he loves the game. Roy probably does not think of himself as 70, he thinks of himself as 60. He will want to do the job he has been asked to do - and if he does it well, he might get another few years out of it.

We were struggling at Fulham when he came in and the first thing he did was make us harder to beat.

He works very hard on the training pitch to create a solid team who are well organised, similar to Sam Allardyce in many ways, and so every player knows their job.

There is no guarantee with any manager, including Roy, that he is going to get a group of players to play differently and save them from the drop. But it is so early in the season that I would be very confident he will be able to do enough with them.

But he has got to get cracking quickly. Palace have some tough games coming up - against Manchester City, Manchester United and Chelsea - and the last thing you want to be doing is chasing teams above you, so the Southampton game is really important for him.

I do not think Palace have been that bad this season - the two home defeats to Huddersfield and Swansea killed Frank de Boer - but I am not sure the team needs too much of a lift.

Losing Wilfried Zaha to injury early on was a blow, but they have got a good squad, some good players and experience as well.

I do not think the players need as much as people think, but I they need to play to their strengths.

For a couple of seasons at Fulham, we played at home like an away team. However, we did not mind because we got results.

It is a shame for Palace that the transfer window has passed because Roy is clever in the market.

So, if Palace can get to January and stay somewhere with it at the bottom, I think you will see them get better in the second half of the season.