Speak to players who have encountered David Silva in the nine years since he first moved to the Premier League from Valencia and the conversation invariably turns to the same theme - that there is no one who is harder to get the ball off, the problem being that Silva is not a man whom the opposition want on the ball.

Researching an article about Manchester City during the first of Pep Guardiola’s two title winning seasons, this observer was drawn to one particular admission from the former Hull City defender, Alex Bruce, who suggested that trying to nick the ball off the diminutive Spaniard was at once one of the most demoralising and exhausting experiences he had encountered. Bruce says they would joke as team-mates about it.

It was much the same in the dressing room at Vicarage Road in September 2017, when Watford’s dishevelled players returned to the dressing room at full-time, having been obliterated 6-0, and collectively wondered if they had encountered a better away team performance and a more elusive schemer than Silva. “You can’t get at him,” one player said. “You think you’ve got him and then he’s out of your grasp again. It does your head in after a bit. Proper frustrating.”