Roy Hodgson has urged William Troost-Ekong and his teammates to be at their best defensively in their hunt for points against Manchester City in Saturday’s Premier League game.

Hodgson, who has a win and a draw in his last three visits to the Etihad Stadium, isn’t thinking about the past and is entirely focused on getting his team ready for the next game.

To avoid underestimating Pep Guardiola’s charges, the 74-year-old expects the Hornets to maintain a disciplined structure and try to neutralise City’s star-studded attack.

“Everyone knows what the situation is,” said Hodgson.

“What we’re going to do is try and make ourselves unpopular.

“If we want to make ourselves popular with Pep, the Man City crowd and everyone else, all we do is go hell for leather and try to match them at their game, which is a recipe for disaster.

“The only chance is to go there and give their play the respect it deserves and make life as difficult for them as we possibly can.

“Seal the spaces that they need to get into goalscoring positions, make it hard for their players in the final third to produce the passes and crosses they need to, and then when we do get the ball, have enough, especially on the counter attack to give them problems.

“We’re enormously wary of the fixture, we know how easy it is to get heavily beaten there because of their enormous attacking talent and wealth of talent Pep has at his disposal.”

Despite the magnitude of the task ahead of them, Hodgson has been impressed with the players’ hard work in training this week and detects a belief in the group.

He acknowledged that a number of team members are out due to minor injuries, but the ex-England manager has practically a full complement of players available for selection.

“The players have done exceptionally well this week, after the bitter disappointment which cost us what should have been a well-earned point [against Brentford],” Hodgson continued.

“We’ve had to pick ourselves up, and the preparation for the game has been as good as I could expect.

“I’ve not seen any falling off in any way of desire, so that gives me some hope that we can go up there and give a performance like against Liverpool.

“It’s a good game to play, I’m hoping the confidence hasn’t been totally shattered by the last-minute goal in the last game where the second-half performance was as good as we’ve given for a long period of time, so I’m hoping they’ll think more about how they played than not just the fact that we had to swallow the bitter pill of defeat.

“We’re monitoring one or two who haven’t been able to train with us as fully as we’d like during the week, but I’m expecting to have a pretty clean bill of health.

“There’s a risk I suppose that one or two others might not make it, but at the moment it’s looking pretty good in that respect.”