Roy Hodgson stands for no nonsense as he faces the press to announce his England squad for Euro 2012
So, here they come again. You know: them. In the end Roy Hodgson's squad for Euro 2012 contained no great surprises, essayed no era-defining shifts and remains a group of men very similar to every other group of men assembled in recent years to sally forth in slim-fit suits and pointy shoes to sweat and snarl and grimace on some humid foreign field. In fact, the only real note of difference on the day was Roy himself. Paradoxically amid all this unremarkable continuity, it was a subtly different Hodgson on stage in the banked and vaulted media theatre lodged within Wembley's high‑spec bowels.
At his unveiling, England's manager had been led out by the elbow under the spell of the marvellously polished David Bernstein, an FA chairman blessed with the wincingly refined condescension of the poshest estate agent in the world, the kind of estate agent who emerges magisterially from his panelled back office once a year wearing a shirt composed almost entirely of cufflinks and wing-collar in order to hobnob with the Earl of Sandwich.
This time Roy was unencumbered: flanked only by a quorum of pinstriped attendants, England's 13th full-time manager took to the stage with a pleasingly understated sense of purpose. Clipped, bullish, even discreetly wiry in his midnight-blue suit, this was a single-minded Hodgson, the multilinguist who appears to have already settled on the kind of talk he's going to talk in this job. "I made a footballing decision," Hodgson said several times. Football manager talks football talk. Roy, they're not going to like it. They're not going to like it one bit.
"Welcome to the conference," Hodgson opened up from his spot in the centre of the FA's teetering advertising plinth, not exactly a grasp of the shirtfront, but a significant moment nonetheless for New Assertive Roy. The announcement of an England squad was once an issue of grave national importance, to be intoned somberly over the wireless like news of decisive military manoeuvres in the Baltic. These days it is as much a matter of gossipy club politics, an exercise in ego-massage and clique-prevention. No manager is immune and Hodgson duly confided that the decision to leave Rio Ferdinand out had "occupied a lot of my thinking time". "It was a hard phone call to make," he added, with the air of a man who has in his time made many hard phone calls, generally without pressing the wrong buttons or getting the curly wire tangled up.
The captaincy issue – that tedious folk-saga of sullen and insular irrelevance – was snuffed out with the fanfare-free appointment of Steven Gerrard. Hodgson even took a moment to re-bestow marital bliss on John Ruddy, who is due to be wed on the same day as the match against Belgium.
"I told him not to cancel it. You live with a wife for a long time," he quipped, suddenly jocular and even rather louche. And mention of John Terry, England's own life-sized managerial voodoo doll, was dismissed with equal facility. "At the moment he's an innocent man," Hodgson pointed out, going back without ceremony behind the raised guard, the impenetrable elbows of his "footballing reasons" and refusing with commendable resolve ("Oh, we're still talking about Rio Ferdinand, are we?") to be drawn on the background, the personalities, the line.
There was some approving talk of Andy Carroll's "strength and power" and even a neat pre-emptive blame-sidestep in the event of any future lager meltdown scenario ("Kenny is absolutely convinced about his seriousness as a professional"). It is hard not to be cheered by Hodgson's selection of Carroll, an extreme if highly specialised talent, who has for much of his first full season at Liverpool worn a wounded look of majestic primal confusion, like Tarzan in the city, baffled on a daily basis by elevators, turn-ups, knives and forks, and yearning instead to leap and soar and bellow unhindered.
Dodging into the gaps between the big-type headlines there were even some nuggets of – whisper it – footballing interest. Mention was made of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain's harassing the Milan midfield at the Emirates this season, and perhaps under Hodgson there might be more involvement for squad numbers 13-23, often present on these occasions as waiters, golf-buddies, banter-fluffers. Towards the end the suggestion that Hodgson hadn't paid any attention yet to England's group stage opponents was followed by the casually detailed observation that France had in fact lost two key players in the final day of the Ligue 1 season to stress fractures (Roy, you sly old dog).
Football talk: this is Hodgson's kind of talk. Wildly over-optimistic pre-tournament forecasts are par for the course and, with this in mind, now might be the appropriate moment to hope that he's still talking it amid the fevered imponderables of the Ukraine in June. Read More
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