Entitlement – the reason Hodgson won’t change or quit
Stubborn Roy is a huge fan of himself and proud to tell us all how wonderful his actually very mediocre track record is.
Roy Hodgson is an intelligent man. He went to grammar school, speaks
several languages, has a rich vocabulary and commanding turn of phrase
and – as he often reminds us – 35 years of experience in football
management.
So why is this intelligent man behaving the way he is, and has been
throughout his tormented reign as Liverpool manager – failing to
acknowledge his deficiencies, blaming the club’s problems on anyone he
can find, stubbornly insisting that he’s doing his best and acting with
incredulity when others suggest it’s not good enough?
The answer is entitlement. He thinks he’s owed it. He believes that the
Liverpool job is the crowning glory of a storied career and that not
only can his fabled methods not be questioned, but they should be
allowed limitless time to flourish.
And the problem – of course – is that the fabled career he’s thinking of
is one that’s been faithfully and fancifully reported by his friends in
the press, fuelled by his own imagination and hubris, and yet not borne
out by his actual record and certainly not by his time at Anfield.
We’ve already heard him retell his palm-fronded arrival at the club last summer:
“someone who had been brought in with the pomp and circumstance, and the
money it took them to release me from my previous contract, and being
feted as one of England’s best managers”
Except of course he was grudgingly welcomed at best, by a group of
supporters willing to give him a chance but knowing he was no Benitez,
Mourinho or Wenger.
And since then he’s upgraded himself from Emperor to Deity:
“having defied people they have started to crucify me”
Perhaps most famously, he took great umbrage at his management style
being questioned, betraying both his ego and the journeyman nature of
his career in his response:
“What do you mean do my methods translate? They have translated from
Halmstad to Malmo to Orebo to Neuchatel Xamax to the Swiss national
team. So I find the question insulting. To suggest that, because I have
moved from one club to another, that the methods which have stood me in
good stead for 35 years and made me one of the most respected coaches in
Europe don’t suddenly work, is very hard to believe.”
Little wonder, then, that while he still maintains that he will not
change the methods that worked so “well” at Fulham and that he “can’t
work better” than he is, he still quite regally brushes off the
complaints of people who think that 12th place, Route One football and a
team and support close to revolt is unacceptable. This despite taking
charge of a squad that got his predecessor sacked for coming seventh and
spending half the money he was given to improve it on Paul Konchesky
and Christian Poulsen. People without those 35 years experience just
don’t understand:
“Fans are waiting for a man with a magic wand that can turn all of the
ills that everyone has seen into something different. Those of us who
work in the game and have been working in the game a long time know that
magic wand doesn’t exist.”
But this isn’t new in Hodgson. This isn’t just the Liverpool job
swelling his head and clouding his thinking. Here he is, interviewed by
the Independent back in 2002:
“Of course, 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. Here, they just talk
about Blackburn Rovers, but that’s just a very small part of a 26-year
career. To most English journalists it’s the only part. I’ve got an
excellent track record in Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and in Denmark,
where FC Copenhagen was my last job before I went to Udinese. We won the
league there by seven points.”
Sound familiar? There’s more that he’s recycled since:
“You can be touted for future glories, then maybe a manager’s fortunes
change and the whole attitude towards him changes. Of course, it’s
wrong. If you’ve got the ability to be a good manager one minute, then
unless people’s judgements are totally wrong, that ability doesn’t just
disappear a few months later.”
But here’s the killer – the real clue to the entitlement that festered
and festered, that was brought to the peak by a Manager of the Year
award that to the rest of us was clearly an Underdog award or for
Lifetime Achievement, but for Hodgson was pomp, circumstance and
deification. Here he is discussing the England job, given to Sven-Goran
Eriksson:
“I was sure he’d do a good job, as has been proven the case. But if
you’ve been a candidate for the job, and you’d be happy to take it and
somebody else gets it, then obviously any feelings you have for them are
going to be mitigated by the fact that you wish it had been you. It
[not being selected] didn’t bother me. I didn’t put myself up as a
candidate. I was just pleased to hear that I was being considered. That
was an honour in itself. It would have been an even greater honour if
they’d said, ‘You’re the man’. But I understood that I was in
competition with some other very strong candidates, names like Sven,
[Terry] Venables, [Arsène] Wenger, all the top people in the game and
you can’t always expect to come out on top. I’m pleased they went for a
good man and that it’s working out because I would have been
disappointed if they’d passed me over and given it to someone who wasn’t
very good and the team had done badly.”
Manager of Liverpool is a late substitute for the career-capping job so
far cruelly denied him. He should have had it then, and before, and
since.
For it was always predicted that he would. Back in the pre-Sky era, when
“continental football” got little press coverage, no TV coverage and
YouTube was unimagined, Hodgson was always portrayed by his journalist
friends as the dark horse for the England job. The well-kept secret of a
brilliant English manager succeeding overseas.
No matter that his success was with small nations and small clubs in
poor leagues, and that his one attempt at a big job (with
Internazionale) was short-lived and ignominious – it was a great story,
and one that fed on itself. He was brilliant – grammar school, five
languages, league titles in Sweden – and he would one day land the
biggest job of all for an English manager.
So when he lucked into one of the biggest jobs in club football – hired
by men who don’t understand the game, just looking for someone who
wouldn’t agitate and generate bad press like the last one – he took his
house-of-cards history and bulletproof ego with him.
He can’t be wrong. It’s the players’ fault, Benitez’s fault, the owners’ fault, the fans’ fault.
The hoof-ball style of play, lack of width, unwillingness to press,
disenchanted team, disenfranchised fans, woeful league position, future
deteriorating every day he stays in the job – no one should mind him
disclaiming responsibility and demanding patience.
He’s entitled.
Exactly what I said a while back.
.
