“I am close to players, I will put my cards on the table,” said Hodgson. “I have always been a coach and coaches get close to players. We have our ups and downs and we push them and some don’t like it but my sympathy is with them.

“In my 35, 36 years in coaching I have not been let down very often, so I have every right to trust players. I don’t trust some of the mechanisms around players, but who does? What a coach does is to say ‘look into the mirror and do something about it’. That is our job. The players of the highest echelon do look in mirrors and analyse performance, so I am not fearful of that.

“I am just sceptical about comments where players are questioning the club’s ambition. I would tend to throw that back at them and say that the club’s ambitions rest in your hands, you’re the ones playing for us and you’re the ones people are paying to watch.

“The statements are so obvious. If anyone is hearing that for the first time or finding it strange then I am talking to the wrong bunch of people.”

Hodgson added: “Players are the key. We pay to watch football. We do not pay to watch, for example, Jose Mourinho – we pay to see his team. Sometimes I can be lured into thinking that is what fans do pay to see, that they go to see the owners in the stand, but I refuse to believe that. People go to watch players, like they go to watch film stars, not who the director or who produced it.”

TONIGHT’S officials are from Germany, Peter Sippel is the referee.