Archive for October 2010
My Very Favourite Hodgo Interview
Everyone’s got one. Their favourite Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson interview ever. And until the pwess confewencth where he blames widicuwous internet tewwowists for losing him his job at Anfield, this is mine. It dates back to 2002 but clearly Hodgo hasn’t changed his methods one iota since then. And why should he?
‘Art of being a good manager doesn’t just disappear’
The Roy Hodgson interview: Nomad of a football coach was as big an influence on the game as Eriksson. Nick Townsend meets a man between jobs with a world of experience
Sunday, 24 March 2002
When you’ve had breakfast with him in Milan when his Internazionale side were flourishing, and a last supper when his days were numbered at Blackburn Rovers, it appears incongruous to bump into Roy Hodgson again at Upton Park and find him summarising on the Hammers’ 5-3 defeat by Manchester United, for Radio 5 Live. Certainly, the coach comes equipped with highly informed views based on vast international experience, but it’s rather like a talented cabinet minister filling in time by appearing on Have I got News For You? He is an eloquent analyst, but his contemplative, and just occasionally irate, visage should be viewed on the touchline, not behind the microphone.
But Hodgson, one of European football’s nomads, accepts his current position philosophically. His dismissal from Udinese in Italy last December has been followed by three months out of work, the Croydon-born coach’s longest absence from the pressures of the game apart from the six months he gave himself to take stock after being sacked by Blackburn at the end of 1998.
He concedes he was not entirely blameless in majority shareholder Giampaolo Pozzo’s decision to terminate his service with the Serie A club. “I was quoted in a newspaper article as saying that it was a mistake to go there, that Inter was a much easier club to work at,” he explains. “But I wanted to leave, so I was quite happy.”
Hence the punditry with Radio 5 Live and Sky TV, and some unpaid work for Uefa. When we met up again later in the week in Richmond, Surrey, where he lives with his wife Sheila, Hodgson had just arrived back from Turin in this week of Anglo-Italian encounters. He had been compiling a report on the Arsenal-Juventus Champions’ League fixture as part of Uefa technical director Andy Roxburgh’s panel of experts. Hodgson has been the manager or coach of nine clubs in five countries, and the national manager of Switzerland. The irony is that, as much as his reputation abroad has on two occasions made him a serious contender for the England job, his principal foray into club management here (he also spent a year at Bristol City in the early Eighties) ended with the late Jack Walker handing him his P45 after an inauspicious start.
“Of course, my track record, if people bothered to study it, would put me in the same category as [Sir Alex] Ferguson enjoys today, but people don’t talk about what I’ve done outside England,” he says. “Here, they just talk about Blackburn Rovers, but that’s just a very small part of a 26-year career. To most English journalists it’s the only part. I’ve got an excellent track record in Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and in Denmark, where FC Copenhagen was my last job before I went to Udinese. We won the league there by seven points. Admittedly, the fact that I walked out and went to Italy to some extent tarnished that reputation…”
It was in his first season at Ewood Park – a job he was offered when his long-time friend, one Sven Goran Eriksson, back-tracked on an agreement to become their manager – that his star was truly in the ascendancy. Coach of Internazionale is a badge that will always draw admiring glances in this country. Two Manager of the Month awards ensued as Rovers led the Premiership before finishing sixth. This, the sages confidently predicted, was the next England manager. Before Christmas the following year, he was out.
For a time, his stock inevitably declined. “That’s always the way it will be,” he says. “You can be touted for future glories, then maybe a manager’s fortunes change and the whole attitude towards him changes. Of course, it’s wrong. If you’ve got the ability to be a good manager one minute, then unless people’s judgements are totally wrong, that ability doesn’t just disappear a few months later.”
He adds: “In my case, I don’t think it has. I went abroad again after that, and still I saw that my name was being strongly linked with England. To be fair to the England camp, they obviously saw beyond temporary success or temporary failure to qualities they thought I could bring to the job and all credit to them for that. They looked at my record overall.”
Hodgson’s begins at Halmstads in Sweden as a 28-year-old, after failing to make the grade as a player at Crystal Palace. In tandem initially with Bobby Houghton, he won the championship in his first season at a club apparently destined for relegation. It was around the same time that Eriksson began his coaching career.
“The football that Bob Houghton and I brought to Sweden between 1974 and 1979 fashioned the whole of Swedish success ever since,” says Hodgson who coached seven players who played in a national team that finished third in the 1994 World Cup. “In six years we won five championships between us. When we arrived Swedish clubs were playing man-for-man football all over the field, very Germanic, following the West Germany and Bayern Munich model.
“Then suddenly, from about 1977, a new breed of coaches, with Eriksson probably in the forefront, came along on the back of this and, ever since, the Swedes have played English football really, so much so that in the last 20 years and the last eight games they’ve not been beaten by England. They’ve achieved it by playing the archetypal English football that Bob Houghton and I introduced.”
Hodgson first met Eriksson when the current England coach arrived at Gothenburg. “We met as rivals and, of course, friends because he became the third man, if you like, to really embrace the Bob Houghton-Roy Hodgson style of football. And he went out on a limb to do so, because at that time this type of football still wasn’t generally accepted in Sweden.”
Since then, the Eriksson graph has been one of steady progress to what, in this country, we might consider the summit. Not so, according to Hodgson. “Sven’s career has been on a high-level plateau for many years, since Benfica, since Sampdoria, Fiorentina, Roma, Lazio,” he insists. “It’s arrogant for us to say that he’s reached the pinnacle by becoming coach of England.”
He adds: “It’s a wonderful career. And he’s playing the kind of football with England today as he has for the past 20 years, the way he did when my teams played against his in Sweden and in Italy. He believes in zonal defence, in compact play, pressurising, getting the ball forward quickly to the front players and supporting them, all the good English principles that Manchester United and Arsenal, Leeds and Liverpool show.
“I thought it was a good choice on behalf of the FA. I was sure he’d do a good job, as has been proven the case. But if you’ve been a candidate for the job, and you’d be happy to take it and somebody else gets it, then obviously any feelings you have for them are going to be mitigated by the fact that you wish it had been you.
“It [not being selected] didn’t bother me. I didn’t put myself up as a candidate. I was just pleased to hear that I was being considered. That was an honour in itself. It would have been an even greater honour if they’d said, ‘You’re the man’. But I understood that I was in competition with some other very strong candidates, names like Sven, [Terry] Venables, [Arsène] Wenger, all the top people in the game and you can’t always expect to come out on top. I’m pleased they went for a good man and that it’s working out because I would have been disappointed if they’d passed me over and given it to someone who wasn’t very good and the team had done badly.”
So, how great would be his confidence if Eriksson, say, fell ill and the FA asked him to step in during the summer? “With the quality of football and players we’ve produced and are continuing to produce, there’s no doubt in my mind that England will do themselves justice,” he says. “I’m convinced we’ll see a good England performance in all three games. Given just a reasonable amount of good fortune that their football will merit, we’ll see the team progress and do extremely well. It’s well managed and it’s got good players. But the group they find themselves in is unfortunate. It really is extremely strong.”
While Eriksson moved on to Italy, Hodgson’s choice was Switzerland, coaching the club side Neuchâtel Xamax and then the national team, with whom he qualified for the 1994 World Cup and reached the second round. Two years later, his Swiss team secured a place in Euro ’96 and held Terry Venables’ England 1-1 at Wembley before being eliminated. Internazionale beckoned and optimism was high when he led them to the 1997 Uefa Cup final, losing on penalties to Schalke 04, but failure to win the scudetto made the sack inevitable. And so to Blackburn.
With uncanny timing, a Rovers fan (there’s not too many of them in Richmond) approaches him in the street, shakes hands, and announces that Hodgson should never have departed. “We suddenly found ourselves near the bottom and that persuaded Jack [Walker], who feared for their Premiership status, to panic. But I remain convinced that if I’d stayed at the club Blackburn wouldn’t have been relegated. The players were every bit behind me as they ever were. We would have turned it around.”
It was back to the scenic tour. To Inter again, briefly, as technical director, followed by Grasshoppers of Switzerland, FC Copenhagen and Udinese. Now, the wait. During the hiatus, Hodgson, 54, who speaks four foreign languages fluently – including Swedish for heaven’s sake – and is an insatiable reader of contemporary as well as classic literature (“I’ve just finished John Banville’s Eclipse”) attempts to be patient. “I’m worried that I’ll get bored and take a job when I should have waited for some other better opportunity to come along,” he says. “I’m sufficiently arrogant to think that I don’t have to put myself around. At the same time, if I just disappear, it might be hard for people to find me. But I probably err on the side of being too discreet.”
During this interval, Hodgson is ideally placed to gauge the relative merits of Italian and English football, particularly with recent Champions’ League fortunes and Wednesday’s international at Elland Road in mind. But, radical thinker that he is, he doesn’t follow the predictable line of reasoning on Italian club football.
“It’s too simplistic to say, ‘They didn’t qualify. Therefore they’re crap’,” he says. “Looking at it from a very technical football viewpoint as I do, I’d say that Roma could just as easily qualified from that group as Liverpool or Barcelona. Technically, against Liverpool the other night they looked quite good. But really it’s about the star performers. Roma will suffer badly without a Totti just as Manchester United will suffer from the absence of Beckham or Giggs. Take Zidane or Roberto Carlos out of Real Madrid and replace them with McManaman and Salgado and it’s not the same. Likewise with Juventus. I’m not convinced that Leverkusen or Deportivo La Coruña are better football teams than Juventus or Arsenal. It could just have easily been that pair.”
However, he does concede: “The Italian league will have a lot of soul-searching to do, just as we would in England if we didn’t have any qualifiers next season, which could easily happen. If I was an Italian club chairman or an administrator I would be very concerned.”
Chances are that by the summer he may study that apparent malaise from close quarters as manager of one of their clubs. Though he insists that it is not “a burning ambition”, you suspect that, in truth, Roy Hodgson would relish another stab at the Premiership. Either that or begin his memoirs. They could call it: The Rough Guide to World Football Management.
Food for thought, children. Food for thought.
Standards corrupted?
The case for Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson has been put forward repeatedly. Most often by his biggest admirer, Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson. And it appears to be that:
- Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson is not Rafael Maudes Benitez
- Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson is English
- Gerrard and Carragher like Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson and did not like Rafael Maudes Benitez
- The media likes Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson
- British managers made to look stupid by Rafael Maudes Benitez like Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson
- Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson is one of the most respected coaches in Europe
- Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson won the LMA award for losing a minor European trophy
- Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson has 35 years of experience
- Liverpool FC paid at least a gazillion dorrar to remove Rafael Benitez and replace him with Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson so Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson must be the better man.
- Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson inherited a team that was relegation-bound and needs therefore to be trusted and given all the time in the world to turn things around and put the club back where in belongs – mid-table, at best.
Well, fuck him. Fuck the media. Fuck Gerrard and Carragher. And fuck England and the English. We’re not English, we are Scouse, and we can see right through Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson.
Experience – Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson does not have 35 years of experience. He has the same year repeated 35 times. Football has changed significantly in that time. But Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson has not developed or grown as a manager. And he appears to be proud of the fact
Ahead of the game against Blackpool, the Reds boss was quizzed as to whether his approach might be wrong when it comes to managing Liverpool as opposed to his former club Fulham.
He said: “What do you mean by that? In 35 years how many clubs have I had?
“What do you mean do my methods translate? They have translated from Halmsteds to Malmo to Orebo to Neuchatel Xamax to the Swiss national team.
“So I find the question insulting. To suggest that, because I have moved from one club to another, that the methods which have stood me in good stead for 35 years and made me one of the most respected coaches in Europe don’t suddenly work, is very hard to believe.”
Have I mentioned that Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson is one of the most respected coaches in Europe? Oh, and what was the result in that game against Blackpool?
One Gazillion Dorrar – The astute financial brains that paid to replace the seventh highest rated manager in the world with someone who couldn’t even crack the top 162 also agreed to pay $252 million over ten years for a rounders player called Alex Rodriguez and then – when forced to get his wage bill off their books – agreed to pay $67 million of the $179 million left on his contract just to see him go. And that’s just one example. The money LFC spent on bringing Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson to Anfield is already gone. It’s no reason to keep him here when the cost of doing so will be to destroy – perhaps irretrievably- the fabric of the team and the club and – quite possibly – relegation and all the financial losses associated with that.
Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson inherited a team that was relegation-bound – Oh fucking really? Last season, we were blighted by bad luck and bad refereeing – the beach ball goal, for example – and by injuries. And apparently plagued by a rift between ageing English players and their more ambitious foriegn team-mates. And we still finished seventh. Which was considered reason enough – by the media, the English players, and those astute financial brains – to fire the seventh highest rated manager in the world – the man who had taken us to two European Cup finals. Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson was supposed to be able to put his arm around the squad, bring everyone back together, and improve on seventh place. So when exactly did the team and the players suddenly become so crap that his job was saving us from relegation and turning everything around? As far as I can tell, it was about twenty minutes after everyone discovered that he was a doddering old shithouse who couldn’t manage his way out of a wet paper bag with a chainsaw. All Hodgo’s supporters realized that he was making them looking like idiots and so they decided to rewrite history to protect themselves and their beloved English manager.
Unfathomable
There is no place for one of the most respected coaches in Europe in the ranks of the 162 Best Coaches 2001-2010.
Seriously. Who the hell do the International Federation of Football History and Statistics think they are?
Good grief! They even placed some Fat Spanish Waiter at seventh. Franklin Rijkaard at eleven. And Manuel Pellegrini at 35. I am appalled.
Elite
If I didn’t have a life (of sorts) I could surely waste mine in dissecting every disagreeable and idiotic utterance from the disagreeable idiot Roy “Hodgo” Hodgson. The man simply can’t let a day go past without shooting himself in the foot. However I do have a life (of sorts) and so I am just going to focus on a couple of statements from a single recent interview.
Roy: We’re fighting to find form – 20th Oct 2010 – Latest News
Roy Hodgson today insisted his players are working hard to emerge from their current troubles.
The boss admits his squad is down after a poor run of results, but he’s taking heart from the training sessions since Sunday’s derby defeat where the Reds are showing determination to find their best form.
“The players were very upbeat today,” said Hodgson. “The training session was very good – the intensity and concentration was as good as one would wish to see at any stage in the season. That, in itself, is very commendable when you are down. You can’t deny that we are down. We are down because we aren’t doing what we want to do, because the fans are angry and disappointed in us; we are down because we are at a great club and should be doing better.
“Unfortunately the reason we aren’t doing better is down to a number of factors. But it was great that we all rose above it and got out there and started playing again. Now we badly need that result or run of results that will at least take us into a safer position when we can live and breathe again.”
Liverpool can forget about their league troubles tomorrow night when they turn their focus to a Europa League clash with Napoli in Italy.
With four points from their opening two group games, the Reds are ideally placed to kick on and secure early qualification – but Hodgson insists his side will face a tough test in Italy.
“They are good,” he said. “I spoke to Claudio Ranieri at an elite trainer conference in Nyon not so long back and asked him about the Italian league and where the major threat to so called big clubs come from. He cited Napoli. Apparently they have a new owner, the son of the famous film producer, De Laurentiis.
“A lot of money has been put into the club, they’ve invested in some big name South American players.
“They are taking it very seriously. They are fourth in the league. Whatever team we play will have a tough game. We’ve got great respect for them. We’ve scouted them, we’ve been to see them play twice and done our video analysis.
“It’ll be a chance for at least four or five players that haven’t played so much this year to show me that they should be in the team or that I should be taking them seriously.”
Let’s leave aside his habitual proactive damage limitation exercise of bigging up our opposition. Let’s refuse to be provoked by the suggestion that if we’re lucky enough to win a few games then we might be able to climb out of the relegation zone. Let’s focus instead on
Hodgo’s continuing addiction to his own self-importance and credentials – If you’ve blinked and missed it, he is fond of occasionally reminding us that he is one of the most respected coaches in Europe, the LMA Manager of the Year, who cost us an arm and a leg in compensation, was welcomed with “pomp and circumstance”, and is far too good to ever manage in Scandanavia again. Even though that’s the only place he’s ever won anything. So of course he was attending an Elite Trainer Conference at Nyon – home of UEFA, donchaknow? I’m only surprised he was prepared to lower himself to the level of the merely elite. Surely UEFA at least had the decency to get someone to bedazzle his conference ID?
Hodgo’s continuing B-Team contempt – Apparently a bunch of ne’er-do-wells that he would have loved to have been able to sign when he was elitely training the Fulham squad now have to fight to get their own manager to take his playing staff seriously. Presumably then it’s their fault he hasn’t been taking his job seriously so far. That might make sense, I suppose. After all, somebody’s got to shoulder the responsibility for everything that’s gone wrong since the highly respected Hodgo arrived at Anfield. And if we can’t pin the blame on Rafa Benitez then it might as well be the B-Team. Still, I’m sure they’re now fully motivated to get Hodgo’ a result in Napoli now. After all, it might be their last chance to get a Euro-elite coach to take them seriously.
Couple of questions:
Is it wrong that I don’t feel even remotely guilty for detesting the manager of Liverpool FC?
Should we read anything into the fact that even the Official Site is allowing Hodgo to shoot off his toes one by one?
Delusional
Honestly, the man is utterly delusional.
Roy Hodgson is the only sentient being in the universe who doesn’t understand how Liverpool lost.
This will be an interesting first test for the New Owners. And for the Dalglish/Purslow axis. I imagine Fernando Torres will become the scapegoat. After all, it’s not like he’s English or anything.
It’s magnificent. But so’s Maine.
So. I finally remembered the password to this account. Just in time to consider the Epic Swindle that saw Liverpool FC pass into the ownership of the Rhode Island, Maine, Massathingy, New Hampshire, Vermont and the Other One. None more New English.
Obviously I’m incredibly glad to see the back of Hicks and the other Other One. And curious to see what happens next. There’s a couple of things I recommend you watch out for.
First, let’s enjoy the spectacle as the “Union” continues to take credit for other people’s work and chase a boardroom role. I imagine they must be praying that Christian Purslow will move on quickly. After all, the “Union” pretty much betrayed him ages ago by insisting on publishing damaging comments that he clearly wanted to keep off the record. He was indiscreet and foolish. They were publicity hogging idiots.
Next, let’s all try to guess exactly what it is that Purslow and the untouchable Kenny Dalglish are trying to achieve. Even Helen Keller would have noticed that the pro-Dalglish media offensive is now in full effect once more. There can be no doubt that there is some sort of high-level conspiracy here. Clearly Roy Hodgson is completely out of his depth and needs to be released asap – if he was a horse we could just shoot him. However, I don’t see him being guided to the door until Dalglish and Purslow are ready to make their next move. Whatever it is they are aiming for, the duo evidently consider it vital to their interests to flex all their available media muscle in the perpetual vilification of Rafa Benitez.
Clearly a lot of us would like to see Rafa come back to Anfield at the end of the season. Equally obviously, the Friends of Kenny could not abide that. Anfield, apparently, simply isn’t big enough for the two of them. So the one-sided power-struggle continues and the obvious assumption is that they’re targeting a place on the board for Dalglish and they see Benitez as a threat.
I come from a family that has supported Liverpool FC since before the Second World War and I was brought up to revere men like Alan Hansen and Kenny Dalglish. But they’re the heroes of my father’s generation. My hero, the man who has defined and personified Liverpool FC for me, is Rafael Maudes Benitez. I admire his fierce loyalty, his dignity, his sense of honour, and his grace under fire more than I can ever say. And as the old guard continue their war against him, so my allegiance to their good names continues to die.
My own completely unfounded conspiracy theory is that Purslow will milk his new-found popularity while Dalglish continues to leverage his outstanding reputation with the goal of establishing effective day-to-day control over the club by the end of the season. With that end-game in mind, everything else is just detail.
Whatever. Regardless of all the politics, infighting, and impoverished Hodgsonball, I do have two pieces of very good news. First, my frankly eccentric collection of pseudo-PJs includes a very old Boston Red Sox tee shirt and it now joins my vintage green Candy shirt as something I can wear while “thinking of Fernando”.
And then there’s the Modern Lovers …
Red Jihad 