West Ham United will have five defenders missing against Liverpool on Saturday but Slaven Bilic still believes his team can pull off a result against opponents he describes as “vulnerable”.

José Fonte, James Collins, Sam Byram and Michail Antonio are unavailable for the home game because of injury and Pablo Zabaleta is suspended after collecting five yellow cards. The injury list might have been worse but Winston Reid and Aaron Cresswell have returned to training and will be ready to play.

“Injuries are part of football but it’s a bit strange because one week ago we were talking about having a full squad,” the manager said. “We had everybody fit apart from James Collins. Winston Reid was injured the day before the game [against Crystal Palace]. Fonte and Cresswell went out during the match.

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“Reid and Cresswell should be available but this week we have had another few injuries, especially defenders, and it doesn’t look great now in that area of team. But we are in position to have a good selection and a good performance.”

A good performance will depend on West Ham, who have kept three clean sheets in the league, defending stoutly. Bilic believes that if they do, there will be opportunities to score against Jürgen Klopp’s team.

“You have to be solid,” he said. “Liverpool are a very offensive team. It is hard to defend for 90 minutes but when you know they are vulnerable you have a chance. You have to be behind the ball, be solid, make it tight for them. But you can’t only defend, you have to expose the weaknesses and space they are leaving behind.

“When they are analysing their season they are happy with attacking but probably not happy with their defensive phase of their game, but like us they are also trying to find a balance. It’s not only Spurs who have shown they can be very vulnerable.”

Bilic also defended Antonio, who will be missing with a hamstring injury, after he drew extensive criticism for the way he gave up the ball before Palace’s equaliser in the seventh minute of stoppage time last Saturday.

“This is not me taking him out of the firing line,” he said. “Mikey is a brave man, he was in the dressing room, standing up, taking responsibility for what he did. He said sorry for his moment of madness. But it wasn’t only him. Three or four other players – if we are being nice about it – were too optimistic.

“Antonio took a bad decision but we had to be in a position that, if Antonio made a mistake, we could stop them having other chance to attack us.”

When asked whether he felt he needed to repeat what is a basic instruction to his players, Bilic said: “You are repeating the message in training, you are repeating those basic things in meetings, you are repeating before the game. You are telling them things you know they know already, but you tell them one more time.

“Then you have another chance if the game is slow or if a player is injured. But once the game goes into that kind of state when it is completely broken, where Palace had nothing to lose and they were not concerned about defending, it’s very difficult.”