There was a moment during the first half when Roy Hodgson – taking charge of his 400th Premier League match – stood on the touchline simply shaking his head. The Crystal Palace manager had just seen yet another of his players succumb to an injury after a week in which three more, including Eberechi Eze, were ruled out of this meeting with Nottingham Forest.
But while it was Steve Cooper’s visitors who created the better chances and could have taken all three points had a brilliant lob from Morgan Gibbs-White not come back off a post, you can always rely on teams managed by Hodgson to keep fighting. The result was a second successive home stalemate and three clean sheets in a row, although new problems for the midfielders Jeffrey Schlupp and Jaïro Riedewald, both of whom had to be substituted, did not go down well with their manager.
