Roy Hodgson, the anti-Klopp who brought his own brand of gloom to an already bleak Liverpool
- The wrong man at the wrong time, the Englishman’s hiring was a spectacular misstep by Liverpool’s owners after Rafa Benitez was fired
- Liverpool travel to play Hodgson’s Crystal Palace team on Saturday
Roy Hodgson is not the worst manager in Anfield’s history. Liverpool supporters travelling to Selhurst Park on Saturday to watch their team play the 72-year-old’s Crystal Palace side may find that hard to believe. Hodgson’s six-month spell on Merseyside eight years ago still makes Kopites wince.
Who was worse? Don Welsh could claim that unwanted title. Welsh, who was in charge for five years in the early 1950s, managed to get Liverpool relegated from the top flight for the first time in 50 years and was prone to eyebrow-raising behaviour.
“He used to walk around the boardroom on his hands when we’d won a match,” Jimmy Payne, a winger in Welsh’s team, recalled.
Pre-game meals were an adventure. “We’ve come in for our midday lunch before the match,” Ray Lambert, a full back, remembered, “and there are people sitting in the hotel. He comes running in and he stands on his hands, legs up in the air, all his money [falling] over the floor. He starts walking on his hands. You’ve never seen nothing like it. That was Don.”
Hodgson’s players were embarrassed in a different manner. Too often it occurred on the pitch.
It was a bleak time for Liverpool and the former Fulham manager was placed in an impossible situation. The club was veering towards insolvency in 2010. George Gillett and Tom Hicks, the owners, were at each other’s throats and the dressing room was divided and discouraged. It appeared that the situation could not deteriorate any further. Hodgson contrived to make matters worse.
[John W Henry] was new to football but it did not need much knowledge to see that the side was in free-fall. Given more time, Hodgson might have taken Liverpool down
No one could blame the Englishman for taking the job. At that point he had been in charge of 16 teams – including three national sides – in a 34-year career. The biggest club he had managed was Inter Milan (twice, once as caretaker). Anfield should have been the pinnacle of his career.
He inherited a squad that finished seventh the previous season but contained Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres, Javier Mascherano, Jamie Carragher, Daniel Agger, Glen Johnson and Pepe Reina. Mascherano, who had been desperate to leave for some time, departed before the summer transfer window shut. If the mood was pessimistic, Hodgson dialled down expectations a notch or two. Before a League Cup tie against Northampton Town, he opined that: “They’ll be a formidable challenge.”
It was not the message the players or supporters wanted to hear before a home game against a team from the fourth tier. Northampton duly knocked out their hosts on penalties after a 2-2 draw.
If Jurgen Klopp earned some criticism in his early days at Anfield for being too optimistic, Hodgson was his antithesis. He alienated everyone. Despite his avuncular image, the Palace manager is frequently testy and combative.
He turned his criticism on supporters, claiming that protests against the hated owners made things “a little bit worse” for himself and the team. The assault on fans became full-on as results deteriorated. “The famous Anfield support has not been there,” he said after a home defeat by Wolverhampton Wanderers.
No one was safe from the blame throwing. Hodgson suggested that he had inherited a substandard squad from Rafa Benitez, the man he replaced. Some years later, when Hodgson was England manager, he bumped into the Spaniard at a Champions League match. Benitez told his successor in no uncertain terms that the assertion was ridiculous. There was plenty of quality at Anfield when Hodgson arrived.
That exchange got to the heart of why the Palace manager failed during his time on Merseyside. Players like Gerrard and Carragher – and a host of others – had been worn down by the internal civil war of the previous three years. People had taken sides and some of them opted to oppose Benitez. The Champions League-winning manager had reached the point where the dressing-room leaders took a negative view of their boss and that effectively sealed Benitez’s fate. The talent remained, though.
Had a man like Klopp entered the scene, he might have enthused a disenchanted group and, despite the behind-the-scenes ructions, unified them. Anfield needed lifting. Instead, Hodgson entered a morass of melancholy and added his own unhealthy dose of gloom. He is the anti-Klopp and he was thrown into an untenable situation by executives who had little sense of what makes a club like Liverpool tick. It took John W Henry, who took control in October 2010, just three months to see this and sack Hodgson. The Boston-based principal owner was new to football but it did not need much knowledge to see that the side was in free-fall. Given more time, Hodgson might have emulated Welsh and taken Liverpool down.
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The grudges remain on both sides. There will be little affection on display at Selhurst Park. The Palace manager feels hard done by in Merseyside. For Liverpool he is a mortifying memory. Klopp will not care. Three points are all that matters to the German but Kopites enjoy seeing Hodgson put in his place – and that’s in the bottom half of the table, not the dugout at Anfield. He was never the worst but he was never good enough for Liverpool.
