Hodgson said he felt Palace were never "really in danger of relegation", but explained that the Premier League by its own nature exerts pressure on teams regardless of their safety.
He told Palace TV: "The strange thing about the Premier League is you put pressure on yourself all the time and we are going to put pressure on ourselves to win those [final four] games or play well in them. So I don’t anticipate much of a relief of pressure or stress – that’s always going to be there.
"Will I be able to tweak the team in the sense of giving one or two players a rest and giving other players a game? I think I can be able to do that, which could be very, very useful going forward. But that’s basically what it will be, it won’t be a question of wholesale changes all the time or giving people a game for the sake of it.
"It will be constantly trying to put a very competitive team on the field so we can reproduce what we did today and I would say go even further: reproduce what we did for long periods against Man City, who are frankly in a different league to ourselves. The top three or four teams in this country, they are in a different league."
The Palace manager also delved deeper into the 90 minutes themselves, outlining Palace's attacking approach to the clash:
"I thought the way we approached the game – front foot, trying to get at them, trying to get a lot of pressure on them as high as we possibly could early on – paid off because it’s not often – in recent weeks in particular – that we’ve had 21 shots on goal and eight on target, and that’s not counting the ones that were probably more dangerous than some of the ones on target which whizzed past the post.
"It’s been a strange season – we’ve suffered one or two unusually bad defeats and that hurts you deep down, it affects your soul in some way.
"But I’ve got to say, looking at the system if you can with a better perspective, it’s been a very good season because we’ve once again played it our way through certain periods with a lot of injuries to key players and yet still here we are with 41 points and still really going strong at the end of the season."
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