Winger Wilfried Zaha admits Palace struggled to deal with Hull City’s formation in Saturday’s 2-0 defeat at Selhurst Park.

Alan Pardew’s side struggled to create too many opportunities against the Tigers and Dame N’Doye’s second half brace sealed a well-deserved victory for the visitors.

Zaha was, though, honest enough to accept Steve Bruce and his Tigers side deserved credit for their win.

He said: “We couldn’t get round their formation really, with the full-backs and wing-backs pushing on. We even changed our formation and I ended up playing wing-back myself.

“We dropped deep and their strikers dropped off.

“It was like they had a spare man every single time, so it made it difficult to play as there was a runner every single time.

“I think we just need to go back to training work hard and go again.”

The England international had an opportunity in the first half but he was denied by Hull’s veteran keeper Steve Harper.

And the former Newcastle stopper also did well to prevent Glenn Murray scoring, although Zaha felt overall it was just an unlucky day for his side.

He said: “We had chances early on in the game and on another day we would have probably taken them.

“I think we reached that point where we ran out of luck.

“Throughout those games we used to score anything, but we need to find that luck again.”

Referee Mark Clattenburg ruled out a Yaya Sanogo header late on in the second half for a foul on Paul McShane, as well as waving away a penalty appeal from Zaha.

And the 22 year-old winger felt both decisions could have gone in his side’s favour.

Zaha said: “I asked him (Sanogo) if he pulled him (McShane).

“He said it was a case of them pulling each other and if they were pulling each other, then it should have been a goal.”

On his own penalty appeal, Zaha added: “There’s not much I can really say about it.

“I felt someone catch my foot.

“The thing is, if your team doesn’t really appeal then it won’t be given.

“Everyone just moved on straight after.”

Palace are three points behind their final tally of 12 months ago and despite the two consecutive home defeats, Zaha is still confident of beating last season’s achievements.

He said: “Obviously, we have bad games but we managed to get to our goal really by staying in the Premier League.

“We just need to buck up our ideas because there’s still a couple of hard games, so we just need to keep going.”

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