I COULD BE A TRAVEL AGENT BY NOW BUT THIS JOB GIVES ME SADISTIC PLEASURE
SAYS ROY HODGSON
IF PLANS made early in life had panned out, Roy Hodgson would have been a travel agent.
‘My friend Bobby Houghton and I were coaching in Scandinavia and we were just under 30,’ Hodgson recalled this week.
‘We said, “Wouldn’t it be great for us to do this for 10 years, save a little money and start a travel business together?”
‘That was the plan. But it was a very loose plan and the wheels fell off it many years ago .... ’
Houghton was to take Malmo of Sweden to a European Cup final — they lost to Nottingham Forest — in 1979. He was last seen managing India in 2011.
As for his mate, he sat at a table at the Crystal Palace training ground on Thursday and talked brightly about the ‘sadistic pleasure’ of football management. This is his 20th managerial post and we can safely assume that the end is not in sight.
‘Sadistic pleasure, yeah that’s a clever way of putting it,’ he said with a smile. ‘It is that to some extent. The suffering never stops, that’s the problem.
‘A lot of young coaches ask me, “Does it get any easier? Can you relax more during the games? Can you put it more in perspective?” The tragedy is that I have to tell them, “No, if anything it gets worse!”
‘Certainly I suffer during games. I notice it with other managers too. The heart thumps.
‘You learn to harden yourself towards it to a degree. But the longer you are in it, you realise it isn’t something you can give up lightly. It’s not something you can walk away from.’ Hodgson spoke recently of having to manage his life away from football very carefully to ensure his energy reserves remain deep enough for the job. He is 70 now.
But any suspicion Hodgson may have stayed in the game too long for his own good was debunked by 40 minutes in his company.
Like many football men, Hodgson looks and sounds most comfortable when work is the topic of conversation.
‘Too much work is not good if it means you are not doing the things you enjoy doing,’ he said.
‘But then, funnily enough, too much play can’t be that good either as you miss that sense of satisfaction and of working with like-minded people. If you take that away then there is a part of your life that is missing.
‘For me, it’s not, “I’ve got to work in football”. I just want to. I would like to think that when my time comes I will be able to find some balance in my life. I am entitled to a bit more play than some because I have done a lot of work.’
That work has been good work of late. Palace were bottom of the Premier League table, without a point or a goal, when Hodgson replaced Frank de Boer in mid-September.
Ahead of today’s trip to Arsenal Palace are 12th. Talk to anybody at the club and they will tell of the uplift in atmosphere. Hodgson sees himself very much as a leader, a figurehead who sets the tone.
‘People say if players are not motivated, if they can’t get themselves going, then something is wrong with the world,’ Hodgson said. ‘But that’s not the way it is.
‘We all need someone to push us on and if you are a football coach it has to come from you.
‘If you sit back and say, “Come on lads, you are footballers, just do it”, then you will very soon see the drop. They take their lead from you — your energy, enthusiasm. It does transmit and I am anxious as I get older to make sure that doesn’t drop.’
Hodgson has always been a ‘boots on’ manager, a coach first and foremost.
His methods are well-known and reliant in part on structure and drills and obsessive detail. Players who just want to play five-a-side need not apply.
But these methods have worked at Palace so far, just as they did at previous English postings at West Bromwich Albion and Fulham. Palace have lost just once in the league since November 5.
What is refreshing about him is a lack of noticeable bitterness. Many managers never recover fully from some of the bashings that come their way.
For Hodgson, any lingering resentment from troubles at Liverpool and with England has been submerged by enthusiasm for the fundamentals of his craft. In terms of moving on after England, Hodgson is much more Eriksson, Robson or Taylor than he is Keegan or Hoddle.
Recently his Palace team were a late missed penalty away from ending Manchester City’s
‘Klopp and Pep are an inspiration for young coaches. Let’s wise up to what they’re doing’
unbeaten league run. Ultimately that task fell to Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool last Sunday.
So what does a time-served English manager make of the fuss being made of Klopp and City’s Pep Guardiola? Are they really reinventing the wheel?
‘Klopp has brought an enthusiastic, pressurising game and introduced a freedom to run at people with the ball,’ he said.
‘Pep is working hard with his beliefs and philosophies. He won’t resort to getting the ball up early. It is not brand new, but it requires a lot of coaching and these two are prepared to do it.
‘Over the years the very English style of football is to hit it long to a striker and wait for the knockdown. But these two are showing that we should not stereotype or just stick with a way of playing in England. We have to try to wise up to what they are doing.
‘This is not the English league any more — it is the top European league. The English players have to raise their game now.
‘Pitches are the most important because there is no way Pep could have played the football he wanted to play in George Best’s time. It wasn’t possible. The training fields back then were mud heaps and if you were lucky your first-team pitch was given the go-ahead to start a game.
‘Now you look for players with good control, good technique, who won’t lose the ball. You could not have done that in the old days whether you were Klopp, Pep or whoever. But I have to say these two are an inspiration for young coaches. Everyone has to find their own way.’ HODGSON’s career has been eclectic, to say the least. His list of jobs reads like a record collection found in a household where everybody likes different music.
There have, for example, been six clubs in Scandinavia and six English postings. Mixed in with that are two jobs in Italy and four national roles — Switzerland, UAE, Finland and England.
At Malmo, where he won five successive Swedish league titles in the 1980s, a section of the stadium is named after him — Roy’s Corner. Neatly, though, it all started for him on the terraces of Selhurst Park with his father, Bill, in the 1950s. Born in Croydon, Hodgson was a regular.
‘I’ve been asked about this before but I’ve never really known how to answer it quite as honestly as I should,’ he said. ‘It should, I suppose, have more of a ring to it because of walking here with my dad, all the years we did, every week, to watch the games, reserves one week, first team the next, standing on the Holmesdale Road, collecting programmes and autographs. All those things.
‘If I was more of a “past” sentimental person, then I think it would probably mean more.
‘What it actually means to me now is the chance to come and work at a club which has really good potential.’
Maybe in that answer lies the answer to some of Hodgson’s equanimity. Sentiment and emotion can often cloud good judgment.
But what, then, would Hodgson Snr have made of his son’s current Upwardly mobile: Hodgson has quickly led Crystal Palace away from the relegation zone role? ‘Yeah, he would have been (sentimental), to be fair,’ he said. ‘He was a Geordie, but came down to London just before the War. Basically speaking, he regarded himself as a Londoner, but he had two teams: Newcastle from his youth, and then he was Crystal Palace all the way.
‘I think he’d have been . . . he was, very proud.
‘Fortunately, just before he died, we (Malmo) knocked Inter out of the European Cup (in 1989-90) and I was really happy that he lived to see that moment.
‘He was very proud of that. And I’m sure he’d have been very proud of this. It would have been great, if he’d still been alive, if he’d come to the games. He died a long time ago.’
One wonders what Hodgson’s players in Scandinavia were earning back in the 1980s. Today’s opposite number Arsene Wenger is about to sell Alexis Sanchez to Manchester United, where the Chilean will earn upwards of £400,000 a week.
‘I try very hard not to make too many judgments,’ Hodgson reasoned. ‘It doesn’t matter to me. People earn what they earn and good luck to them.
‘I don’t like that idea that you should morally sit back and say it’s “obscene”, as someone said earlier. You can use that about any high earner.
‘I’ve never had that desire to accumulate more or compare myself with other people. You know, “He gets more than me, why should he?” It’s not in me, luckily. As long as the clubs can afford it, as long as the clubs are not bankrupting themselves, then it’s just one of those things.
‘It’s something for people to tut about over their coffee.
‘Personally, I like the artistry of the game. I still get a lot of pleasure watching the good-quality teams play, where the movements of the players are co-ordinated.
‘It’s almost ballet-like, although that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But I like seeing those movements and the interaction between team-mates and the movements of how you support each other, work for each other, make runs. I enjoy that very much.’
To Hodgson, it seems the good he finds in football will always outweigh the bad.
That’s probably why he is still standing, still pushing forwards, when many of his generation are in their armchairs.
His old mate Houghton is retired now and living by the sea near Cape Town.
Hodgson continues to put his shoulder to the wheel.
‘The important thing, I always think, is the present and the future,’ he said.
‘Looking back... it doesn’t serve a great deal of use unless, like Churchill suggested, you use it to benefit what you are doing in the present.
‘Knowledge of the past can be very useful, but I don’t think you should ever live there.
‘Once you do start doing that, you really have no chance of doing a good job in the present.’
‘My dad was a Palace fan... I think he’d have been very proud’