Completely agree. I have one friend who is a Fulham fan and another who supports WBA and neither of them can understand my utter hatred for the man as they both like him and think he did a good job for them. Everything about him winds me up. I never wanted him in the first place but this is where the hatred first began:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/l/liverpool/9112856.stm
And then the throwing players under the bus:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/league_cup/9025262.stm
Part of a post I made comparing Rodgers and Hodgson, I think you will quite quickly see where my opinions on the topic lie.
"He [Rodgers] is incomparable, absolutely incomparable to Hodgson. Hosdgson was a c*nt. I would sit down and have a drink with Rodgers. Rodgers would talk shit, give me guff about how it was other peoples fault and how he had his eye on lots of other jobs that were big, real big. But he would also acknowledge how big the club was and how he had a great time there. Hodgson I wouldn't piss on if he was on fire. From day one he talked the club down, talked the players down, talked the traditions of the club down and talked up our rivals. He also ignored the fundamentals of what made Liverpool great, pass and move, and instead tried to implement some 1960s version of football, big uns and little uns, long balls, constant crosses; Rodgers never did that, if anything he was too optimistic about the abilities of the players.
Hodgson happily threw players, younger players in particular, under the bus. I will never forget that cup game where he three all our teens to the wolves and afterwards sneered they weren't good enough, despite the fact they were all out of position and dead on their legs after extra time. Pure c*nt.
Hodgson never respected the club. He was more about the FA and LMA. He was a man who would happily take the side of a British manager over the club because he knew that played well with the FA. He was the ultimate example of someone who saw the institutions surrounding the game as more important that the game itself. For him Liverpool was a self-interested, small actor in a much bigger system and his loyalties lay to that system, not to his employers. Why? Because he knew that for a British manager, club roles came and went but to stay employed, particularly when you were a mediocrity, you needed to be on board with the organizers.
For Hodgson Liverpool was a stepping stone to the England job, the most important role one could achieve. Rodgers probably also saw Liverpool as a stepping stone to greater things but you never got the impression that he disrespected the club; he was ambitious but saw Liverpool as a big job. Not Hodgson, he saw Liverpool as a big club on its uppers that needed to be tamed, to be put in its correct place, a club that needed to realise the new realities of the league and become a subordinate feeder for England.
I laughed like a drain when Hodgson was appointed England manager. A more useless fuck was never given that role, as the results show. He took over an obdurate if uninspiring side and turned them into serial losers and under performers at competition level. It exactly mirrored his short tenure at Liverpool. His impact on Liverpool was poisonous and took years to rectify. His role at England was longer and has, arguably, left them even more devalued and damaged than any other manager before or since. Just as he did at Liverpool he has now persuaded the general public that England are a shitter team than they actually are, stuffed full of reprobates who don't care about their side (when in fact, for most, its all they care about, to distraction). That was all about making sure that the Hodge legacy remained unsullied. And where is he now? Hilariously he is running an FA commission to improve the state of the game in England. Hah!
I am Irish, I support the Republic. It is stuffed full of terribly ordinary players who massively over achieve. I keep getting asked by colleagues how Ireland are able to do that. Esprit de corps is the answer. The Irish team is a unified and hard working team. It's because O'Neill, for all his faults, is able to get the team believe in his vision, his identity for the team. For a while Rodgers was able to do that at Liverpool before it all melted away. Hodgson never achieved that at Liverpool because he never had the club, the players or, most importantly, the fans, on his side. He was an FA suit masquerading as manager. I would never compare him to Rodgers because whereas Rodgers was a bit of a spoofer and a bit of a dreamer but fundamentally a decent person Hodgson was a complete c*nt ."
