Holloway praises ‘ultra-professional’ Palace performance

He was restored to the side after a one-game suspension put him out of the team that drew with Hull in midweek.

But Holloway revealed he was close to not playing because of illness.

He said: “We actually controlled the game which is terrific. Some ten men can really hurt you and we managed to nullify that and look ultra professional, even down to Glenn Murray giving up the penalty for his hattrick because he’s missed one or two recently.

“I just thought that summed it up for me. I congratulated him, he was ill this morning, he wasn’t going to play but we managed to get him out there so I’m very pleased.”

Holloway also admitted his side was helped by the early sending off Lewis Dunk for a foul on Yannick Bolasie.

“Gus (Poyet, the Brighton manager) is a fantastic manager and he tries to dominate the ball and pass it and once they’ve got a man short that gave us the impetus,” he added.

“We managed to grab it. We spoke out getting it wide and getting at people and what we needed was Glenn Murray really. His header - fantastic cross, got his eyebrows on it.”

Gus Poyet had no complaints about the sending off, and described it “as totally right”.

He said: “You’re coming to play a nice game of football against your biggest rivals and away from home at least you want a normal game and going down to ten so early it put a big task ahead of us.

“Also we’ve had a problem with defenders, we didn’t have too many available and also we’ve had a defender sent off.

“(The sending off was) an absolutely perfect decision and you want the ref to make those decisions in these types of games because you see so many times that because of these types of games they go “yellow”.

“No, it was a red card.”