Sam Allardyce admits Crystal Palace will miss out on primary January transfer targets

If Sam Allardyce is to produce the sharp turnaround in fortunes needed at Crystal Palace, he knows he will have to make the most of the nine days which remain in this January transfer window and hope they bear more fruit than the weeks which have preceded them.

His only signing so far, Jeffrey Schlupp, performed admirably enough on his debut against Everton, but was ultimately on the wrong end of the game’s decisive moment.

Wracked with cramp at the opposite end of the pitch, the £12.5million signing from Leicester City could only watch as Seamus Coleman glided through his vacant left-wing back slot and then scored an 87th minute winner.

Schlupp was supposed to be one of several new faces. Instead he arrived alone, and Allardyce admitted after Saturday’s chastening defeat that the 24-year-old is the only primary target of “a dozen or so” that he and Palace’s recruitment team will manage to bring in.

“I've had that many players on my desk for the last two weeks, I've looked at that much Wyscout, that many reports, watched so many games that in the end we got them to file all that down,” he said.

“The ones that we've already done that on are not coming now, so we're down to the next level on what's available and what we might bring in and might come. We've done a good dozen or so and we got one. We thought we'd have got more but we haven't, so we're on the next dozen or so players we filed down and then looked at carefully.

“We can't panic in this particular moment. We've got to remember that we have two new players coming back at the end of the Africa Cup of Nations, Bakary Sako and [Wilfried] Zaha, two new players lifting the rest. More new players, like Jeffrey’s performance today.

“I thought that was very good,” he added, still smarting from Coleman’s late strike, which could also have been ruled out for offside. “We all talk about Seamus Coleman being one of the best right-backs in the country and [Schlupp] matched him today for me, so that's a positive.”

One positive on a day of few. Allardyce will need more, perhaps before the month is out, if he is to maintain his record of having never taken a team out of the Premier League.