Delayed trains and Indian weddings hamper Roy Hodgon's return to The Hawthorns

The Crystal Palace manager guided his team to a goalless draw with the Baggies after a difficult 24 hours of preparation.

Not only was his team's train journey delayed on Friday, but his players were kept up all night, and then two of his squad were removed before kick-off.

Scott Dann suffered a virus overnight and goalkeeper Wayne Hennessey was injured in the warm-up. But the bad luck started on Friday.

"It was a lovely day, we had a nice training session and got to Euston in good time for the train," said Hodgson, who got a warm reception from the Albion fans on his first return to the ground.

"We got on the train at 3.23pm and then at 3.30pm it suddenly stopped dead because there had been problems with the wires overhead.

"Then the train is on a track and can’t go anywhere and with little information we spent three-and-a-half hours stuck in the dark, the cold and with no toilet facilities.

"They eventually got a train alongside to evacuate us and got us to Birmingham.

"Instead of getting there at 4.45pm, we arrived at 9.30pm and then the hotel we’d intelligently booked was the venue for an Indian wedding so there was plenty of noise until 2am. Anything which could go wrong did go wrong."

But Palace battled to a point that lifted them off the bottom of the table.

"It’s a nice moment," said Hodgson. "I don’t want to be too clever about it, if someone said before the game we’d be off the bottom at the end of it I would be very happy.

"I’m not exactly carried away by it. It was a good point, a good performance in many ways especially considering the mishaps we had getting here.

"We had to thrust a few players into the team at the last moment, including the goalkeeper, and the disastrous journey we had the players were provided with a lot of excuses to not provide the right type of performance but they didn’t take them.

"We got a deserved draw. There’s a long way to go, if we can keep doing what we’ve done there’s a good chance we can get ourselves out of trouble."