Sorry for another Roy Hodgson post, but as it's written, best to post it on 'ere to be torn to shweds.
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Roy Hodgson always seemed a cheery, affable sort to me. The first time I ever encountered the man was, oh, 1994 or 1995 maybe? 1993? It seems a lifetime ago now. And for some of those reading this, maybe it is.
At the time, media stalwart James Richardson's freshly balded napper and corriera-del-gelato-fresco was appearing twice or thrice weekly on Channel 4 (yes - that's Channel 4 - you didn't read it wrong). Known as "Gazzetta Football Italia", a weekly magazine show, or "Football Italia" when live games were shown, these shows introduced a generation of football lovers to their new, exotic bit on the side. People like the now Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini or the departed West Ham manager Gianfranco Zola became as familiar to us as those whose presence in Italy gave rise to the show in the first place. Pauls Gascoigne and Ince were sideshows to the ongoing excellence of our new found favourites like Beppe Signori, Atillo Lombardo and Dario Hubner.
For the live games, you got the standard fayre of commentator and summariser. And so we became accustomed to our Sunday afternoon routine, nursing the hangover with pots of tea and munchies and switching over to take in the latin festivities. If Peter Brackley (or Gary Bloom - "Fantasticooo") had Don Howe or Paul Elliot stood to their right, you knew you were grabbing the remote (if you had a remote) and turning the sound down. If, on the other hand, Lady Luck served you up a Luther Blisset or a Ray Wilkins, you knew you were gonna enjoy the chat to accompany your weekly serving of Marco, Franco and Paolo. You kept the sound up. And the same applied when we were introduced to a new summariser - an affable, studiously polite man by the name of Roy Hodgson.
This was a few years into our time with Football Italia. At the time, Hodgson seemed to have been parachute dropped into our collective consciousness as a prodigal "Uncle Travelling Matt" of a football manager. He'd done his stint in Turkmenistan and Ulan Bator, and now he was back to sew the seeds of his accumulated wisdom. And we listened. And, well, we were impressed.
My impression of the man at the time was almost universally positive. I was young, admittedly, and maybe less judgemental than I am now, but he seemed a sage man whose positive and pleasant demeanour would make him a pleasure to work with, and to work for. Coupled with that, he talked clearly about he game, and with direct experience of Seria A and the football they were broadcasting week in week out, he talked with ease about the players on show and the teams in front of us. He seemed to live and breathe the game, and was clearly a born ambassador for it.
His star rose gradually from that point in the British Media, steering the Swiss national team to comfortable qualification for Euro 96, and amidst the plaudits that went with it, taking the reins at Inter Milan. It was natural, therefore, that he came to spend time alongside Messrs Richardson and Brackley, and he continued to come across as a true gentleman of the sport for the duration. And given the precarious nature of football management in Italy, we didn't think much was untoward about it when his time at Inter came to an end.
But while we were treated to our weekly snippets from Gazzetta Dello Sport and Corriere Della Sera in the various mediaeval piazza of the "boot", the detail passed us by. Or possibly the steady attrition of time and supercession led us to forget the little incidents that looked back on now, might seem significant.
Hodgson's time at Inter demonstrate several other facets to his working persona. When you dig into things further, you discover a man who was reduced to tears by his players and the media, was only persuaded to stay until the end of his final season by his Chairman (a confirmed friend to this day), and whose relationship with the new footballing superstar of the time, Roberto Carlos, in many ways encapsulates his approach to the game to this day.
Carlos, like Hodgson, appeared like Mr Benn as if by magic in the aftermath of the 1994 World Cup. Brazil played a friendly at Wembley (in which Graeme Le Saux scored a ridiculous show-stealing volley) and in the post-match analysis, Alan Hansen picked out the little Brazilian as one to watch. Notable in the analysis was the moment when, receiving a punt from the English central defence under pressure from a closing marker, Carlos watched it drop from the clouds, and in one deft movement, gently cushioned it one-touch with his instep over the head of the onrushing midfielder, and strode on to take the ball forward in mid air before it had touched the ground. A simple display of breathtaking talent at the highest level.
Carlos moved to Inter that summer, and immediately made an impact, scoring a goal that's still seared in my memory w@nk bank - a swerving bullet of a free kick that lodged in the stantion of the postage stamp, cushioned by the little "D" shape that kept the net neatly squared behind the goal line, as the ball continued spinning furiously in the little bulge of onion bag.
Phew! What a player. But not, it seemed, in the mind of Roy Hodgson. Hodgson to this day likes his sides to set out in a solid defensive structure, with choreographed movement between the players on the field depending on where the opposing side have the ball. Doing that successfully requires what's often tagged "positional discipline". (It's an unfortunately half-assed reference in my view - more on that at a later date.) In Hodgson's view, cushioning balls out of the air on the volley and striding forward to gun for the postage stamp on the edge of the opposing box was not in the job description for your jobbing left full back. And there's a big part of me that agrees with that idea. It takes a pretty special talent to make an exception - the kind of player who can carry a team, and whose team mates are happy to adjust to accomodate him. Alternatively, it takes a very sophisticated system to bring out the best in that kind of player - the kind of system that takes years on the training ground and levels of quality throughout the squad to sustain it.
So Hodgson dropped Carlos. And naturally, the media siezed on the fact, and wondered why. And Hodgson responded with his footballing brain. He's not a politician. He's positionally indisciplined, he would say. And the fans would throw their hands in the air, and wave them like they just didn't care, and then lay siege to the training ground, as was their Italian wont.
The following clip, for example, shows an Italian Journalist challenging Hodgson on his decisions related to Carlos. It's fair to say Hodgson, judging by his reaction, had had enough of that kind of thing by that stage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hKvNoqgDX0&feature=player_embeddedSuch is the pressure and media spotlight a manager enjoys when taking the helm at a giant of a club. There are only a handful of clubs in that bracket, but Inter Milan are one of them. And so, it's fair to say, is Liverpool.
At a smaller club, when a manager generally has a relatively weak squad at his disposal, and when jewels are generally sold to raise ducats for reinvestment or debt divestment, a manager who can get results enjoys little or no second guessing from his fans or the media. Sure, you get debate, but if you punch above your weight, everything's great.
At a big club, things are different. And at a big club in relative decline that still has delusions of former grandeur, things are even more different. Having enjoyed dominance and dynastic succession in its time, the fans of Inter Milan expected a certain approach to their football. A certain swagger and arrogance. Having said that, as the nursery in which the seeds of Catenaccio took root, Inter fans also had a tradition of pragmatism and organisation to their football. So it was an odd heritage to take on as a manager.
It's fair to say that the Inter fans' more recent memories of Klinsmann, Mattheus and Brehme and their successful Scudetto tilt with a marauding teutonic brand of football prevented them from accepting something closer to what they'd seen in the 60s. Catenaccio, and counter-attacking football by extension, had become seen by some football fans as 'the right of the weak' (see Paul Simpson's article of the same name in Champions Magazine, March 2010). To swallow that kind of football on a regular basis, then, is to accept on some level that you're no longer a dominant force. That's a bitter pill to swallow on any level of consciousness.
So it was that the Inter fans pelted him with coins and lighters despite reviving the club's fortunes. Meanwhile the Italian media joined the fray, and Hodgson consoled himself that at least he enjoyed the support of his Chairman. It's maybe fair to say that Inter's former greatness sustained expectations far beyond what was justified at the time. It was only in the years following Calciopoli that Inter truly returned to the top of the tree in Italian football. This despite a decade of almost unparallelled investment in their playing staff.
The same probably applies at Liverpool - the club was once the finest in Europe, and could boast that fact for the best part of a decade and a half. So in light of his experience at Inter, should it come as a surprise to Roy Hodgson when Liverpool fans express their angst? British fans, like their Italian counterparts, are capable of putting pressure of their own on, albeit in a relatively gentle way. Likewise our media, who while no strangers to a pop or two at Hodgson's predecessor, mostly operate with some semblance of British reserve.
It's fair to say the Liverpool fans are patient. And it's also fair to say they're tolerant of pragmatic football. The great sides in the late 70s and early 80s were as capable of gritty no score draws away from home as they were the brand of swashbuckling football they became associated with in people's minds. The fans understood the game, and didn't expect the finest football on tap. They understood their role in contributing to it - and they seldom disappointed when their team needed them.
So the mere fact that Hodgson sets his teams out defensively - that the balance is a little too deep, and that the approach is a little too passive for the fans' taste, and that certain players seem boilerplated to the team sheet template - those things in themselves wouldn't generally alienate a manager from the majority of the club's fans. The brutal fact is this. To enjoy tolerance and the kind of time you need to bed in your methods, you need to set the right tone. You need to be crafty with your communications. If you're not, you best tread carefully. But it's not really that hard, particularly for someone who's so likeable.
Beneath it all, there lies a man with an affable nature and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the game. In the absence of what he sees as unwarranted scrutiny and pressure, that core to Roy Hodgson's nature shines through. But when he feels that he and his methods are under siege, his fundamental nature becomes veiled. He puts on his chain mail. And like John Cleese in The Holy Grail, he tells us it's just a flesh wound. But the flow's not been stemmed.
The irony is that with the merest tweak to his approach, he'd see the people he sees as enemies become his allies. All he needs to do, in the words of Colonel Pogue from Full Metal Jacket, is "jump on the team and come on in for the big win".
As it stands, there's a simple reason the club's fans haven't taken to him. As our own Yorkykopite says...
Quote from: yorkykopite on October 20, 2010, 10:47:49 PM
He speaks about the club like he's a neutral.
It's one thing to be suspicious of the media - most managers are to some extent. Early on in his time at Anfield, journalists commented about his seeming less at ease than they were used to - that he seemed irritable. And of course he soon developed the habit of referring to influential journalists and bloggers as if they were malicious fantasists. Again, nothing unusual in the great managerial scheme of things. That's not really the problem.
His problem is partly that he's honest to a fault, and it betrays where he is mentally in his relationship to the club. He talks in glowing terms about his good friend Mr Ferguson. He mentions run-of-the-mill results as 'historical'. He talks of the risk of Manchester United coming in for his star striker in the January transfer window. He criticised the fans for their role in the ouster of the club's former owners. But more significant than any of that, he talks as if he's not part of the club itself. After the Chelsea win this weekend, when asked if this meant the club were back on track, he said it meant the club were "nearer to the top of the table where everyone believes that Liverpool belong".
In one sense it's insignificant. They're throwaway words bounced back at a chubby Ewok no-mark in a post-match interview. But put yourself in his position for a moment, and think about what saying those words signifies. What thought go on between his ears to arrive at that statement? Liverpool Football Club's fortunes are independent of my own fortunes. "Everyone" believes "they" deserve to be at the top of the table. "Everyone" - not "I". "They" - not "Us".
And people wonder why the fans feel alienated. People are using words like "cuckoo".
Roy Hodgson remains a nice man. Despite what people might tell you, he didn't pen the pilot show for X-Factor, he didn't invent Barney The Dinosaur, and in the dark of night, he doesn't don a twin set and head down the bingo for some blood and carnage like the White Wrigglers from The Maxx. He's a diamond geezer. He's a gent. He's one of your own. But he'd do a good job remembering how to convince us of the fact.
A simple tweak would put things straight. Talk about "us", and "we", and "I". Show the Liverpool fans that your own heart and soul are in the job. And who knows? Maybe they'll show you the same in return.
