TWITTS OF THE YEAR
More people - 128,000 a minute! - tweeted about England’s Euro 2016 demise to Iceland than any other sporting event of the year... but Roy blames his players and the Press
ROY HODGSON is the man who put the ‘twit’ into Twitter – by presiding over sport’s biggest meltdown of 2016 on social media.
In his first public comments since he quit as England coach on June 27, following the Euro 2016 apocalypse against Iceland, deluded Hodgson blamed his players’ failure to understand his tactics and the written Press for a national embarrassment.
But at least the manager who won only two out of his 11 games at major tournaments was top of the class in one aspect. Hodgson was responsible for the United
Kingdom’s largest stampede of keyboard warriors this year, with England’s humiliating defeat by Iceland in Nice generating an astonishing 128,000 tweets per MINUTE.
By the time Hodgson’s dunces were doomed to an early exit from France, they were chalking up 21,000 tweets-a-minute more than Leicester’s 5,000-1 outsiders clinching the Premier League title on the night closest rivals Tottenham could only draw 2-2 at Chelsea.
And in official figures released by Twitter, Daniel Sturridge’s stoppagetime winner against Wales in the Battle of Britain was third in the network’s traffic charts for sport this year at 77,000 posts a minute.
Hodgson, 69, broke cover about his disastrous England reign in UEFA coaching magazine The Technician after almost six months of keeping his counsel.
But instead of taking responsibility for six unnecessary changes against Slovakia or assigning Harry Kane to take corners, he claimed his players failed to grasp what was required of his tactics. And Hodgson even turned his players into parrots, asking them to repeat the instructions they had been given at a series of “unit meetings”.
International footballers do not usually enjoy being required to recite what the teacher has written on the blackboard.
But in his essay, Hodgson wrote: “One of the things I have learned was overestimating players’ understanding of exactly what you want. You have to make sure that they themselves take ownership of the situation.
“In the last couple of years with England we filmed the training sessions, we filmed the games in wide angle and we started having meetings in smaller groups.
“The goalkeepers and defenders. The midfield players and the attackers. Sometimes defenders and midfield players. Sometimes midfield players and attackers.
“We will work on it in training but then I want the player in the unit meeting, when he sees fit, to say, ‘I should have gone out there’. Or ‘I’ve gone too fast. I should have slowed down there’. That type of thing.”
Hodgson also turned his fire on the written media, asserting that “they can take the words that you say and make it seem very different to how it actually was, but you can’t beat them.”
When 128,000 people are rushing to condemn you on social media every minute for the worst England performance in a lifetime, it is a feeble defence to blame the papers on your doormat the following morning.