Crystal Palace boss Roy Hodgson has defended the attitude of his players.
Earlier this week, a banner was put up outside Palace's training ground demanding change to a 'pandemic of apathy' at the club, and to 'restore the pride, ambition and vision'.
Hodgson admits he expects fans to be critical when things are not going well and readily agrees that Palace need to do better, but he does not believe results are down to the players being apathetic.
He said: “Well I didn't see it (the banner). I don't think it was up for very long but I of course heard about it.
“You expect the fans, I guess – when you give a couple of performances like the last two which have been way below what we expect of ourselves – to react and to be critical of the performances.
“I would deny of course that it's a lack of interest or desire on the part of the players. We can't deny that we haven't played well enough to get the results in the game but that's a fact of life as well.
“But I would deny that's because the players were apathetic or they haven't wanted to do better, because I see on the training field every day how hard people do work, how much they do well.
“But of course when it doesn't go well I'm afraid that you open yourself up to all sorts of criticism of that nature. It goes very quickly after the results against Wolves and Newcastle, the mood was positive and the criticism was non-existent and actually a lot of praise was coming the players' way.
“I honestly don't believe in two weeks and in two performances that everything has changed to that extent but we do need to do better than we've done in the last couple of games, there's no question of that."
