Roy Hodgson will not punish Patrick Van Aanholt for his tweet in the wake of last weekend’s defeat at Sheffield United after the defender claimed he did not post it.
A post coming from the left-back’s verified Twitter account earlier this week suggested Palace did not match the Blades’ effort in the 1-0 loss last Sunday, but when questioned about it, he denied sending it.
The tweet read: “Sheff Utd just wanted it more than us, boys are p*ssed, we just couldn’t get going, but it’s a long season ahead, back to work.”
But Hodgson, who takes his side to Manchester United at the weekend, does not agree with the analysis, whoever wrote it.
“Whether he said it or not it has gone out under his name, he unfortunately will have to bear the brunt of that,” said Hodgson, who confirmed the Dutchman would not be fined.
“That is the answer I got, I have no idea. I am going to make no attempts either in the next few days of my life to get to the bottom of it.
“It has been said, I don’t believe it is true what he supposedly said and I am moving on from there. There are facts of life at the moment and social media is one of them.
“He didn’t say it apparently. It is wrong to put that out because it isn’t true, I wish it was as simple as that.
“I wish I could have said that (they wanted it more), but it was a lot more complicated than that.
“Analysis of games come down into the same level, ‘Which team wanted it more’.
“I have found that impossible to quantify. When I was at Inter every time there was injuries it was the doctors’ fault, ‘We’re losing because of the doctor’.
“There is a mass of cliches that people go to, but there are an enormous amount of things that might have contributed to the fact that it was a bad day.”
The issue comes at a time when social media is dominating the headlines after players have been subjected to horrific abuse, with Tammy Abraham and Paul Pogba both racially insulted after games.
While Twitter has said they need to do more, Hodgson does not believe he can ask players to stay off the site.
“Can you do that? Draconian measures never work,” he added. “Stopping people from doing things that they really want to do and imposing, you are asking for more trouble than you are going to solve.
“We constantly preach to our players not to make major errors. But one of our players has supposedly put something on Twitter which wasn’t put out by him at all, it was put out by his agent or someone he knows.
“Where do you go from there? If you call the player in and say, ‘That is wrong’ and he says, ‘Well it wasn’t me’, then where do you go from there?”
