“At half-time we were looking good, and hoping that we could kill the game,” he said in his post-match press conference. “The equalising goal came a bit too quickly for my liking of course, but even then we got back into the game and we were working very hard.
“We missed a very good chance for the second goal. It was very disappointing to lose the match with 10 minutes to go.
“It wasn’t exactly a gift we presented them as it was a fine goal, but it’s still disappointing to lose the match in that nature.”
Hodgson explained his team selection for the night, which saw a slight tactical tweak.
“We were hoping it would give us an extra player in the centre of midfield,” he explained. “We thought it might give us a chance to do a better job combatting the threat posed by those pockets with Maddison and the others.
“We thought the extra man may help us, and we thought that Wilfried Zaha and Jordan Ayew would come back and help out, and then we would break from that shape and we could ask questions of our own when we got hold of the ball.
“In the first-half that was good – we could have scored two goals of our own but unfortunately we didn’t take it.”
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