HAVING just passed the halfway point of the season, City prepare to do battle with opposition for the second time of the season - and boss Glenn Roeder knows his side will need to be on their toes against Neil Warnock's Eagles.

Palace won the reverse fixture at Carrow Road in late November and Roeder is only too aware of the threat posed by Warnock's side: "They are a typical Neil Warnock team, always in your face, they don't give you a second to breathe, try to run all over you and are quite direct, which you have to deal with. There will be lots of deliveries in the box for us to handle defensively.

"They are always full of running and we have to stand up to that, match that, hopefully do better than them in those departments and we mustn't forget to play our football.

"We can not play route one football, we have to get the ball down and pass the play to each other and shift the ball through the team because that is the sort of players we have here and that is the sort of players that I want here. But I certainly have no problem with the way Palace play their football. It is always a challenge playing up against a team that have their own distinctive style of play, I look forward to that."

After a much-improved second half display in that November match City still came away empty-handed, losing 2-1 to goals from Craig Beattie and John Oster: "It is good to play them quite quickly after we lost at home to them because we gifted them two goals in the first half and then we came out and were terrific in the second half.

"It was an excellent second half performance, Matty Pattison scored a brilliant goal, diving header, but we just couldn't get the second goal to get a point out of the game that we deserved."