I’m going to close the book on Roy. You ready? OK.
Roy Hodgson will tell you himself: “I’ve been in football a long time”.
He certainly has — a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long time, and somehow it feels even longer. His old friend Alex Ferguson could famously manipulate injury-time on a weekly basis, but Roy’s ability to turn minutes into hours and months into years will almost certainly never be matched. In the same way that weather forecasts often include a “real feel” value alongside the forecasted temperature to take account of other, less measurable factors (e.g. humidity, wind chill), there are so many imperceptible qualities to the Roy Hodgson experience that the man should surely have had some kind of similar “real feel” index attached to him by now. As it stands, even a roomful of scientists would struggle to calculate and assign such a value to his time at Liverpool and would probably under-estimate by a matter of years. To paraphrase a line from Irvine Welsh’s
Trainspotting, “take your worst ordeal, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you’re still fuckin’ miles off the pace”.
How can one simple, journeyman mid-table football manager bend time to such an extent that 6 months can feel like such an eternity? Well, there are many in the English game who will enthusiastically line up to tell you that Roy Hodgson is
not just a simple, journeyman mid-table football manager at all, exactly as they did when he was appointed to the two biggest jobs of his career: Liverpool in July 2010 and England in May 2012. And you know, I’m beginning to think that maybe they’re right in some ways — for example, I myself have begun to wrestle with the idea that Roy may not even be of this
realm. Not only has he shown an ability to mess with the very fabric of time itself, he has also long since bewitched members of the English football fraternity to such an extent that they seem to willingly do his bidding at every turn like the sailors in Greek mythology who fell under the spell of the siren’s song, only in this case it’s journalistic integrity being dashed against the rocks rather than ships.
Even now, having unmistakeably failed in those aforementioned high-profile managerial roles for which these same people passionately championed him, they can still be found twisting his every act of basic competence into proof of greatness and placing blame elsewhere when it comes time to apportion it. On Monday night, for example, Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville reiterated that had Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City not been
so good last season, the Crystal Palace boss would have been a good shout for manager of the year. More on that lunacy later, but for now, suffice it to say that the Hodgson script couldn’t read much better if Roy himself was writing it.
Case in point: Roy’s last job before taking charge at Selhurst Park was “guiding” England to consecutive major tournament exits at the hands of Costa Rica (2014) and Iceland (2016), performances which plumbed levels of humiliation historical in their depths. Now, time was when the England job was so poisonous that Bobby Robson was treated like a doddering fool for reaching quarter- and semi-finals in successive World Cups, Graham Taylor had his head superimposed onto a turnip for being eliminated in the group stages of a European Championship, and World Cup-winner ‘Big Phil’ Scolari ran back to Rio as soon as he got an up-close look at what was in store for him if he took it. Roy, on the other hand, went sailing down the Seine rather than scouting his team’s next opponent and more or less received a free pass, relatively-speaking.
Robson and Taylor, in particular, are well-known within football as having been true gentlemen, an interesting point to note in the context of Roy’s much-vaunted “decency” which is regularly trotted out by his band of media cheerleaders and could conceivably, I suppose, be the reason why they went easy on him after the failures of 2014 and 2016. But then that old Match of the Day footage leaked earlier this year and you were left to wonder whether Robson or Taylor,
truly decent men by all accounts, would have ever spat “let’s not take the piss here” at a reporter during a routine post-match interview, a match his team had
won, incidentally. The measure of an England manager’s “decency” certainly never cut much ice with the media from 1982 to 1993.
Well then, perhaps half a century or so of investing every failure, perceived and otherwise, with an exaggerated sense of profond indignation had simply ground the English football media down enough so that by the time Roy showed them what
real failure looks like, they were somehow unable to recognise it?
As Liverpool supporters, we know better that that. Once upon a time, we were forcefed the notion that this man was good enough to follow a European champion into the Anfield dugout and manage our club, a set of false narratives and attributes as long as your arm conceived and flogged to near-death by supposedly objective journalists for no other reason than to have one of their favourites installed in a big job. The level of his failure at Anfield was both stark and undeniable, but deny it they would. One of his more passionate admirers probably spoke for a lot of them when he sneaked the following scurrilous little digs into articles 4 years apart that were otherwise concerned only with deifying Hodgson, by then the England manager:
...in between jobs he endured a wounding six months at Liverpool, where restless fans and a hostile local media gave him a drubbing. As he might admit, he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Scousers are loveable, aren’t they? Always ready to give a chap a hand.
...a brief, troubled spell at Liverpool, where a touch of minstrelsy is considered obligatory. A rounded man, he remains indifferent to Liverpudlian indifference, which is as it should be.
Believe it or not, there are actually a few nuggets of truth buried there, in amongst the baiting and tacit excuses. The fans
were restless, although Roy’s role in that is left unaccounted for; he did
eventually get a “drubbing”, however the local media was largely supportive at first (“the positives appear to heavily outweigh the negatives” proclaimed David Prentice in the Echo upon his appointment) and if they did ultimately turn hostile, that was based on many factors of Roy’s own making, not least his team’s performances on the pitch; his spell at Liverpool
was troubled and (mercifully) brief; and Roy
was certainly “in the wrong place at the wrong time”, namely 12th place (and 4 points outside the relegation zone) in January 2011. This was a habit he would go on to actively cultivate as England manager, ending up in other “wrong” places such as 4th place in Group D following the first round of matches at the 2014 World Cup and sailing down the Seine with Ray Lewington when Iceland were preparing to take to the pitch against Austria in June 2016.
One thing the writer
is wrong about (Michael Henderson is the name, by the way) is on the notion of “Liverpudlian indifference” (I’m assuming he’s talking about the Liverpool fanbase as a whole here, although his particular aversion to Scousers is made crystal clear). I have no problem believing that Roy is indifferent to us — he came across as someone who couldn’t be arsed about the club for his entire stay — but it remains very difficult to return the favour in the other direction.
Prior to July 2010, my own feelings towards him were the very
definition of indifference — I was no more interested in him than I would be in Claude Puel, Mark Hughes or Javi Gracia in 2018. Not until the early months of 2010, with Fulham on their way to the Europa League final and Rafael Benítez finding himself beseiged from all sides, did his arrival at Liverpool seem even remotely possible. I took a bit more notice of him after that, naturally.
Personally-speaking, I think I would have been able to return to that same state of indifference even
after his disastrous spell in charge at Anfield had it not been for the intelligence-insulting arse-covering he engaged in during his time at the club. I mean, it could certainly be argued that we had bigger fish to fry at the time, with the campaign against the outgoing owners in full swing during September/October 2010 and the club coming within hours of administration, and Hodgson’s brief tenure is, in any case, nothing more than a minor footnote in the club’s history. A truly “decent” man just doing his best and failing would have been one thing, especially under the circumstances. But we’re not talking about that, we’re talking about an individual who:
— Called a Europa League qualifying win away to Trabzonspor a “famous European night”, despite managing a club which had reached European quarter-finals or better in 5 of the previous 6 seasons and had beaten Real Madrid 5-0 on aggregate as recently as 17 months before.
— Quipped before the second Premier League game of the season away to Manchester City that “I hope we don’t get beaten 6-0”.
— Suggested that League Two side Northampton Town would be “a formidable challenge” for Liverpool — he would probably tell you that he was subsequently proven right, but he absolutely shouldn’t have been given that Northampton were 85th of 92 clubs on the Football League ladder when they knocked Liverpool out of the League Cup,
at Anfield.
— After starting the season with 6 points from a possible 18, suggested that “maybe six points is not so bad”.
— Suggested that the club was “in a relegation battle” after 7 games.
— Called a win at Bolton “a famous victory”, so famous that the only reason anyone remembers it today is that it was his only success away from home during his time in charge.
— Stated after Liverpool’s 0-2 loss to Everton at Goodison Park (still the club’s last defeat in a Merseyside derby, almost 8 years ago and counting) that “to get a result here and win the game would have been utopia” — for context, Hodgson’s predecessor had lost 3 out of 14 derbies and won on 4 out of 7 visits to Goodison Park, his successor would lose 0 out of 4 derbies, beat them in an FA Cup semi-final and also win on his only visit to Goodison, and to date Liverpool have lost only 14 of the last 81 against Everton going back as far as September 1985 (33 years).
This self-preservatory streak was all-pervasive during his 6 months in charge, infecting every public utterance of a man who was representing Liverpool Football Club every time he stood behind a microphone. It was accompanied by some arrogant, and often downright nasty, comments to journalists which strongly suggested that a bully lurked beneath the supposedly kindly exterior. For example:
— “Unbelievable. How many clubs have I had in 35 years? What do you mean ‘do my methods translate’? They translated from Halmstads to Malmö to Örebro to Neuchâtel Xamax to the Swiss national team. The question is quite frankly insulting, I suppose. That question is suggesting something. To suggest that suddenly because you move from one club to another, the methods that have stood you in good stead for 35 years and made you one of the most respected coaches in Europe suddenly do not work. I find it very, very hard to believe that someone has even asked me that question”.
— To a Norwegian journalist asking a fair question, he described Denmark and Norway as “two countries I never want to work in again”, out of what I can only imagine was pure spite.
Coupled with the poor results, expecting Liverpool supporters to get behind Hodgson in the autumn and winter of 2010 was, under the circumstances, the equivalent of asking for a miracle. But what made it worse before, during and after his time at the club, and has seen to it that the relationship between many Liverpool supporters and the club’s former manager has continued to fester in the intervening years and remains a gaping, weeping wound to this day, is the behaviour of large swathes of the football media. Not Roy’s fault necessarily, but there you go.
British managers with an unwarranted sense of accomplishment and a high opinion of themselves are nothing new. From mainstays like Sam Allardyce (“I would be more suited to Inter or Real Madrid”) to relative non-entities like Tim Sherwood (“...my win percentage was 59 per cent — which is high”), self-promotion is often high on their agenda. Roy is no different, in fact he may be one of the worst offenders. For example, despite having only won 12 trophies in his 42 years of management, all of them in the Danish, Swedish and Swiss leagues, he was quoted in 2002 as saying the following: “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”. Wow.
The big difference with Roy is that while the English media will normally show support and give the benefit of the doubt to homegrown coaches and managers to an extent, for example by eagerly pushing their names forward for end of season awards or humouring them in their deulsions, there is usually a point at which they will stop, typically based on results. That doesn’t happen with Roy, and that’s why it’s very difficult to remain indifferent towards him.
What makes it so difficult to separate the Roy Hodgson who left Liverpool in January 2011 from the Roy Hodgson who has since moved on to West Bromwich Albion, England and Crystal Palace over the intervening 7 and a half years isn’t the grievous loss of Rafael Benítez in 2010 after 6 years of being tormented by these people, especially during his last season in charge. It isn’t the “deep wound” that I argued in October 2010 was still being felt and wouldn’t be healed “until we have a man in charge with a vision and the talent to see it through” (I believe Jürgen Klopp has duly obliged on that score). It isn’t the hypocrisy that drips from the process of criticising one man’s every signing while cheerfully allowing the likes of Paul Konchesky and Christian Poulsen to arrive and leave without a cross word being spoken, or calling a man who has never to my knowledge had a harsh word to say to a journalist, who wept at the Hillsborough memorial and donated money to the HFSG “a cold political animal” while propagandising the “decency” of his replacement, a man who has demonstrably bullied journalists on multiple occasions, or talking up one man’s multilingualism and thirst for knowledge while thoroughly ignoring another’s, or telling a European champion and multiple La Liga winner that 7th place (7 points away from the top-4) and a European semi-final is an unacceptable return for a season after 5 years of success but treating a home defeat to Northampton Town and 12th place after Christmas like it’s peachy.
No, it’s none of that, nor is it the barefaced propaganda that helped to force Benítez out and shoehorn Roy into the Liverpool job in the first place, a job for which he was clearly ill-equipped, equating a career mostly spent largely in, I’m sorry, the minor leagues of European football and World Cup qualification with Swiss football’s golden generation in the mid-nineties with real, quantifiable success, effectively pissing down our collective leg and telling us it was raining as they made the case for him. And it’s definitely not the fact that it
worked — the most powerful person at the club, then-Chairman Martin Broughton, was listening to them and, referencing criticism of Rafa’s exit in an e-mail to Jim Boardman in June 2010, explicitly stated, presumably as some kind of justification, that “I note your opinion doesn’t seem to be shared by the media”.
That’s all history now. But if there’s one factor stopping that septic, maggoty sore from healing, something that’s a constant reminder of his time here and everything that both preceded and followed, a link to the past, if you will, that renders indifference an impossibility, it’s this:
They’re still doing it. The extent of their devotion continues to know few bounds, and having already gone so far as to sacrifice their own team (England) at his altar when they summarily ignored his utter failure at Liverpool and doubled-down on their deceit following Fabio Capello’s resignation in 2012, it’s fair to say that their adulation won’t be dying down any time soon. We’ve seen this man, a simple, mid-table journeyman football manager (with a nasty temper from what I’ve seen), described variously as a “sage” with an “affable, ego-free nature” who is a “serious, thoughtful and above all forward-thinking and innovative coach” guided by a “light that shines within” and who, of course, “is a great lover of literature and has read the works of nearly every Nobel prize winner”. After Monday night, they could add “comedian” to the list of all that this Renaissance Man can do.
“It’s not a penalty. I’ve been in football a long time. If that’s a penalty, then the game has changed beyond all recognition. There’s no way he’s looking to foul the player. He’s trying to defend. There’s no way he’s looking to get contact on the player himself. I don’t want penalties for my team in that way.”
I’ll be honest, I laughed out loud when I read these words, these words that apparently left Roy Hodgson’s mouth in all seriousness following Monday night’s game. Aside from instances of deliberate handball on the goal line to stop a certain goal, examples of a defender deliberately fouling an opponent in the penalty area are rarer than media coverage of the Crystal Palace manager that doesn‘t mention his penchant for reading. If Roy doesn’t “want penalties for my team in that way”, then it‘s quite simple — they’ll never get any. I mean, what kind of moron actively
tries to commit a foul in the penalty area? And this isn’t the first time that Roy has pitched this idea of “intent” when it comes to penalty awards. For example, when Luis Suárez was fouled in the box against West Brom in November 2011, he said the following: “I think the 25,000 people watching, even the Liverpool supporters, will probably agree with me that it looked like a very, very harsh decision and there was certainly no intention to foul the player or give away a penalty”.
But wait — with the audience still rolling in the aisles, Roy followed up with this beauty: “I do think it was a penalty when Max Meyer is wiped out in the area when Van Dijk dives in.” So just to review: contact in the box = no penalty, no contact in the box = penalty? Maybe instead of reading Milan Kundera, Ivan Klima and Stefan Zweig, he should brush up on the laws of the game he has been gracing for so long?
All joking aside, I’m hugely confused by Roy’s late-career interest in what does and doesn’t constitute a foul. Back in September 2010, following a 2-3 loss at Old Trafford, his opposite number Alex Ferguson decided to accuse Fernando Torres of diving (“I have watched it again. Fernando Torres made a meal of it, an absolute meal of it. There is no doubt he tried to get the player sent off”). When Roy was given the opportunity to defend his player, he made it clear where he stood: “I prefer to talk about the game and talk about issues that interest me. Sir Alex is entitled to any opinion he wants to have but I’m not going to come here and say I agree or disagree. I thought the referee refereed the game very well and I have a very ambivalent attitude to those type of things”. That ambivalence has evidently disappeared in the meantime.
Carragher and Neville weren’t quite as emphatic on Monday night, but despite admitting that Mamadou Sakho’s boot made contact with Mo Salah’s leg (i.e. he committed a foul inside the box), they were loathe to outright say it was a penalty. It’ll be interesting to see if they’re quite so circumspect the next time Harry Kane or Dele Alli go down in the penalty area upon feeling a similar level of contact.
Other than the inability (or reluctance) of Sky’s Monday Night Football braintrust to recognise a penalty if it reached out of their flatscreens and slapped them in the face, what struck me most about the evening’s coverage was the inherent contradiction in how the lads spoke about Crystal Palace. On the one hand, they hyped Liverpool’s hosts throughout the evening — this was going to be a hugely difficult test for the visitors, the home side was bursting with quality, they had never lost a game that Sakho and James Tomkins had started together, and then afterwards they named Everton and Palace as the most likely teams to finish as “best of the rest” outside of the top-6 this season, effectively tipping Hodgson’s men for the top-8 in the process. And then in the very next breath, they acted as though Roy is some kind of genius for saving them from the drop last season like they’re a bunch of hapless, helpless stiffs, as mentioned even going so far as to pitch him as the campaign’s second-best manager after Pep Guardiola.
Well you can’t have it both ways, lads. You can’t go out of your way to hype a team before, during and after a game, reiterate throughout how difficult it’s going to be for their opponents and praise their players effusively, while at the same time eulogising the job their manager has done to such a degree without the related, contradictory implication that the squad he inherited was actually performing at its level under his predecessor (i.e. no points and no goals in the first 4 games) and that he had to work some serious magic with those famous methods that have translated from Halmstads to Malmö to Örebro to Neuchâtel Xamax to the Swiss national team in order to keep them up.
The work Roy Hodgson has done at Crystal Palace is good, he deserves credit for it. Despite the memory of his time at Liverpool, I can objectively say that with no difficulty, or at least I can do so in a vacuum with no other elements involved. But as soon I hear the same voices taking a competent managerial performance and trying to exaggerate it into something more noteworthy, my mood immediately fades to black and I suddenly find myself unwilling to recognise anything he does, to the point where I’ve even come to look at Allardyce’s Palace record as a stick to beat him with (and I’m certainly no fan of ‘Big Sam’).
Palace already had an excellent squad of players for a lower-half to mid-table club, and Hodgson had 34 games to turn it around,
34. Far be it from me to offer anything but scorn towards Allardyce, but what he had done with the same club the previous season is a far more apt description of a rescue job. He only took over in late December and went on to win a higher proportion of his games than Hodgson did last season (8/21 = 38% vs. Roy’s 11/34 = 32%), and he also guided Palace to wins at Anfield, Stamford Bridge (in the season that Chelsea won the League under Conte) and a 3-0 destruction of Arsenal at home. He also signed 4 of those players that Sky were so giddy about ahead of the game on Monday night (Jeffrey Schlupp, Patrick Van Aanholt, Luka Milivojević and Sakho).
Hodgson, by contrast, bought zero,
none, of the 11 players who started against Liverpool. Leaving aside Aaron Wan-Bissaka, who is a Palace youth product: Wayne Hennessey was Tony Pulis’ first signing back in January 2014; Colin Wanker signed James McArthur later that same year and initially loaned Wilfried Zaha back from Manchester United, with the transfer later made permanent under Colin’s successor at Selhurst Park, Alan Pardew, who would also go on to sign Christian Benteke, Tomkins and Andros Townsend during his reign. Sam Allardyce signed Van Aanholt, Schlupp and Milivojević during his only transfer window in charge of Palace, and he also brought Sakho in on his initial loan deal, a transfer that was subsequently made permanent during Frank De Boer’s brief time in charge.
All of these players were already there upon his arrival, and prior to this summer he had added nothing to the squad he inherited. So, in effect, there are only two mutually exclusive options to choose from here:
— These players are actually mediocre and, therefore, it follows that Roy did a brilliant, manager of the year-worthy job last season keeping them up.
— These players are actually pretty good and were under-achieving, therefore Roy merely achieved par for the talent available to him in the squad by finishing 11th.
If it’s the first option, then Sky were guilty of nothing more on Monday night than hyping Liverpool’s opponents in order to build anticipation for a televised game; but if it’s option number two, then we’re once again looking at the media exaggerating basic competence at his job into significant, praiseworthy accomplishment.
People go weak at the knees for Carragher and Neville’s analysis, but look at this from my point of view: I tune in and listen to the pair of them for the first time in absolutely fucking ages, and practically the first thing I hear them do is engage in the same kind of Hodgson-related nonsense that I’ve been listening to for the best part of a decade.
Analysis? This is the exact same kind of “analysis” that said a European semi-final and a 7th place finish in 2009/10 was unforgivable, only to forcibly push the narrative that this mediocre, career mid-table journeyman manager would somehow improve things without ever suggesting how or admitting their error when he failed.
Ironically, it’s Rafa Benítez, now at Newcastle, whose work once again goes unsung the most thanks to the media’s continuing Roy-crush. Club by club, there are arguably only about 5 who exceeded expectations in the League last season:
— Manchester City (by reaching 100 points and having the title effectively wrapped up before Easter);
— Burnley (by finishing best of the rest outside the top-6, qualifying for Europe, and going from 16th with 39 points the season before to 7th with 54 points);
— The 3 promoted sides (Brighton, Huddersfield and Newcastle), who were almost universally expected to struggle and go back down.
The rest either failed to meet their season objectives (e.g. Arsenal, Chelsea, Southampton, Stoke, Swansea, Watford, West Brom and West Ham, several of whom sacked their managers as the season progressed) or achieved par, more or less (e.g. Bournemouth, Everton, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham).
Accepting that David Wagner might be a little bit of a stretch given that Huddersfield only just stayed up by the skin of their teeth, the best of the rest after Guardiola were Benítez, Sean Dyche and Chris Hughton. Given the relative poverty of his squad, a compelling argument could be made for Rafa’s season being the most impressive out of those 3, but that doesn’t even matter — the point is that across 38 games, vs. Roy’s 34 games admittedly, he achieved the same number of points and finished in the top-half with a vastly inferior squad (it terrifies me, for example, to think of what Rafa could do with the likes of Zaha, Townsend and Benteke at his disposal rather than last season’s strikeforce of Ayoze Perez, Dwight Gayle and Joselu).
Hodgson walked into a job where millions had already been lavished on the squad, while Rafa almost immediately lost his best players (Moussa Sissoko, Gini Wijnaldum, Townsend), got relegated thanks to the mess Steve McLaren left, then came back up and finished 10th with a Championship-level squad that had seen minimal investment. This is the very definition of coaching excellence. Genuinely, leaving all bias aside, Hodgson shouldn’t even enter the 2017/18 manager of the year runner-up conversation alongside Benítez, Dyche and Hughton. And yet he does, again.
Well do me a favour, then, all of you, Winter and Hayward and Lipton and Henderson and Carragher and Neville and Murphy and every other Hodgson mouthpiece in the media who’s ever gone to bat for this mediocre, journeyman, mid-table manager. If you insist on promoting him, if you find yourself utterly unable to free yourself from your own delusional Hodgson-related fantasies, or at least engage the filter between your brains and your keyboards, then put your money where your mouth is and accept this challenge: the next time Manchester United lose a game, throw as much dirt as you can in José Mourinho’s eyes, then take Roy, his collection of Nobel Prize-winning authors, his light that shines within, his ego-free nature and the rest, comb his hair, wipe his face, load him up, light the fuse and point him directly at Old Trafford.
As you once did so effectively 30 miles down the M62.
