Sam Allardyce hopes Dubai training camp will help Cenk Tosun adapt to pace of the Premier League

Sam Allardyce is hoping a warm-weather training break this week will better prepare Everton's new signing Cenk Tosun for the rigours of the English game following his £27m move to Merseyside club in January.

Tosun arrived from Turkish club Besiktas with a strong reputation as a clinical goalscorer but in the five Everton matches since he joined, he has started just the first two, he was an unused substitute on Saturday and he has a combined total of just 196 minutes of first-team action under his belt in the last two months.

Everton fly out to Dubai on Wednesday and although Allardyce believes Tosun was fit enough for the Turkish Super Lig, he admitted the 26-year-old has plenty of work to do in the Middle East.

"He is struggling with the pace of the Premier League which happens to more players than it doesn’t who come in in January," Allardyce said.

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"He was up to scratch when he was playing but there is more demand at this level to get to the level and show the ability he has got. There is no doubting his goalscoring ability but you have to have the capabilities to get in those positions to score those goals and that is the hard bit.

"When you are on the grass in short sleeves and shorts and a pair of boots players don’t want to stop training and don’t want to stop playing football, in fact we have to stop them. That is what you get when you get out in the right climate."

A drab first half at Goodison Park on Saturday gave way to a second period that saw four goals as finishes from Gylfi Sigurdsson, Oumar Niasse and Tom Davies set Everton up for the three points before a late penalty for Palace's Luka Milivojevic gave the visiting fans something to belatedley cheer.

Eyebrows were raised around the ground when Morgan Schneiderlin was heavily booed by home supporters when he replaced Idrissa Gueye after 80 minutes following a series of performances deemed under-par by the club's supporters.

Despite that, there were mainly positives to take from the occasion, one of which was the energetic performance of Davies, and Allardyce praised him for the way he has tried to recover the form that made him one of English football's hottest young properties 12 months ago.

"He asked what he needed to do to get back into the team," Allardyce added. "He didn’t ask me, he asked the coaching staff and [performance director] Ryland Morgans. They said here are your training stats - lift up your training stats and you will have a better opportunity to get into the team and his impressive work in training caught the eye."

Palace manager Roy Hodgson admitted that his injury-ravagedside could still slip back into the relegation zone following a performance that was high on organisation but extremely low on flair or excitement.

In yet more bad news for Hodgson, Mamadou Sakho missed this match after picking up a minor calf knock in training on Thursday and he joins the likes of Wilfried Zaha, Bakary Sako, Jeffrey Schlupp, Scott Dann, Jason Puncheon, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Connor Wickham on the sidelines.

"There's no reason for me to panic as of yet," Hodgson said. "I suppose I will start panicking when we get into the situation where there are not enough games left to get the necessary number of points. We are fully aware that we are one of the teams who are going to have to fight relegation issues this year. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that we get dragged into the bottom three again. We got out in the past."