This weekend sees Roy Hodgson return to Anfield for the first time since leaving by ‘mutual consent’ last January. He is a man who has been in football for a long time and has earned respect along the way and I’m sure if he’d never been involved with Liverpool our fans would consider him to be exactly the kind of football person we love seeing visit our stadium. Since he left us he’s not really said anything bad about the club despite having the opportunity to feel bitter about how short his stay was and I think he should be welcomed back with the applause that he didn’t particularly get when he was in charge.
The Hodgson months at Anfield were far from successful but I think the short length of his reign makes it unfair for us to be completely critical. There’s no denying he seemed to be the wrong person for the job but not everything that went wrong during his time can be pinpointed as purely his fault. He inherited a team very low on confidence with a few key players desperate to move on, not an easy situation for any manager. Some of his signings were poor, notably Paul Konchesky and Christian Poulsen , and this didn’t help his cause. Poulsen was someone who we had been linked with in the year or so before Hodgson arrived so I’m not totally convinced this was 100% his signing, and Konchesky has played in the top flight long enough to have done better for us than he did, he certainly didn’t do his manager any favours with his performances. We also acquired Joe Cole and Raul Meireles in the summer of 2010. Cole was an exciting signing who totally flopped, he didn’t have a single game where he was particularly memorable. When Kenny took over in January a lot of players (Maxi, Kuyt, Lucas) upped their game but Cole didn’t, again this makes it seem like it was the player, rather than the manager, who didn’t deliver. Meireles turned out to be a decent player, certainly not a world beater but someone who could make a difference when he was on form and we more than got our money back when he moved on to Chelsea.
It’s hard to know exactly what went wrong when such an experienced manager walked in through our gates. His style of football is a fairly negative way of playing but we had a side with so little confidence when he arrived that even Arsene Wenger trying to play his breed of fantasy football would have struggled, getting a bit of defensive solidity back into the team was the right way to begin but unfortunately the clean sheets didn’t come along with the change in tactics. There probably isn’t a manager in our history who hasn’t suffered a five month period similar to the one Roy Hodgson experienced, but sadly for the man now in charge of West Brom that was his only five months in charge, rather than a blip in an otherwise successful era. It’s fair to say that if he had presided over a run of league results similar to the one we have just had he would have been out of the door before he had chance to turn things around.
It would seem that the current owners have a game plan for the club which Hodgson, probably rightly, didn’t fit into. They wanted a man the fans would get behind and support, someone who knew the club, and they couldn’t have made a better choice than Kenny Dalglish. Whether or not this turns out to be the correct appointment is still in the balance after sixteen months, but even during our bad run it still felt like there was more optimism in the air than at any time since Rafa left. It’s good to see a respected English football man like Roy Hodgson doing well at a good club and I hope all Liverpool fans wish him every success, just not this weekend.
Always liked Woy, it was an understated appointment that was meant to steady the ship not find rockier waters. By the time he left he had to go but can't hold anything against him.
ReplyDeleteIt was that euro game we went to against a Dutch side when we played like a table football team that made me know the wrong manager had been appointed.