Roy Hodgson insists he remains positive despite Crystal Palace's grim reality

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The last time Roy Hodgson went into a match without a recognised striker was 19 years ago today.

He was Blackburn Rovers manager and had Kevin Gallacher out with a broken arm and Chris Sutton absent with a heel injury. Taking his team to Lyon in the third round of the Uefa Cup, he had no option but to play Jason Wilcox up front. Wilcox was sent off and Blackburn were knocked out.

19 years on, Hodgson is taking his Crystal Palace team to Manchester United this weekend again without a specialist centre-forward. Christian Benteke is out for at least six weeks – likelier two months – with knee ligament injury, and Connor Wickham is not fit either. That leaves Hodgson out of options for a game just as hard as the one at Manchester City last Saturday, which Palace lost 5-0.

The likeliest answer is that Bakary Sako will start there. He did at least play up front – and score – in the Carabao Cup against Huddersfield Town 10 days ago. His last Premier League start, in fact, was at Old Trafford, when Palace lost their 2-1 in April 2016 under Alan Pardew. But he is not the ideal target man for how Hodgson’s teams tend to play.

It is almost impossible, after six defeats from six games, for Palace to feel optimistic about Saturday’s game. With Wilfried Zaha and Ruben Loftus-Cheek out too they will not have much quality on the pitch, nor will they make it especially hard for a rampant Manchester United. All they can do is hope to escape into the international break without too much more goal-difference damage.

What these players need is a lift from somewhere. But how can Hodgson keep them optimistic when the prognosis is so grim? “I don’t quite know how to answer that,” Hodgson said, when asked about that divergence on Friday afternoon.

“At the moment I haven’t noticed that there’s any difference in that. The players, especially from what they’re showing us on the training field are showing us a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of optimism. But as I’ve said so many times, what we’re desperately in need of are some good performances, hopefully that might lead to some results, and that might make life easier for everybody.”

But life is not going to get any easier any time soon at Selhurst Park. Hodgson even said in his press conference that there is “pain ahead” for Palace, which is certainly true, even if it is not what people want to hear. It is the football equivalent of Winston Churchill’s offer of “blood, toil, tears and sweat” made in 1940.

“There’s no way I can see outside - at the moment - of the need to just keep working and plugging away, at what we’re trying to work on and plugging away at,” Hodgson said.

“I hope the players respond as well, as I think they’ve responded to it so far. And that they don’t lose heart, because results haven’t shown that it’s the right way to do it. There is no short-cut, there’s no words. It is just keeping going and trying to get a better team performance than we’ve had up to now.”

So whatever happens tomorrow, there will be another two weeks of hard work down in Beckenham before their next game, hosting Chelsea in two weeks’ time. If there are any team-building exercises or away days planned, to get the players’ minds off the league table, Hodgson did not want to talk about them.

“I’m afraid the only thing we have planned is to continue with our training session and keep working the way we have been working,” he said.

“I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve. And anyway I don’t know that as professional football people we need to have our minds taken off things. I don’t think that is my job to entertain them, and take their minds off things. When they come here, they come here to work and, I hope, to get better at what we do, which is play football.”