Evidence suggests that Roy Hodgson's vast experience offers few indications that he is the man to take England forward
Persistent rumours that Roy Hodgson is planning to give Andy Carroll a starting role in Friday night's match against Sweden evoke two conflicting responses. The first is that England's new coach is a flexible thinker who is capable of using his knowledge of the opposition – in this case Sweden's vulnerability to aerial power – to modify his tactics. The second is that he is in danger of leading England back into football's Stone Age, into a lost world of long balls aimed at a hefty target man.
At 64, Hodgson is already a man with more than one legacy, the most notable of them embedded in the football culture of Friday's adversaries. And although his first priority in his current incarnation is to bring success – or at least respectability – to England's senior international side, his appointment came with an undertone of hope that at last the Football Association is on the way to creating a structure that will imbue the whole of English football with a coherent vision.
When Hodgson signed his four-year contract with the FA last month, it was widely assumed that, being English and a former schoolteacher, he would show an interest in the country's age-group teams and in St George's Park, the forthcoming technical centre, in particular, aspects of the job for which Fabio Capello showed scant enthusiasm.
The opening of St George's Park, the FA's answer to France's Clairefontaine and Italy's Coverciano, would seem to offer the ideal opportunity for the introduction of a single football philosophy, imposed from the top. But for all Hodgson's vast experience and his decades of networking with other top coaches, the evidence presently available offers a rather uncertain verdict on his potential as England's visionary.
Hodgson will have the strange experience on Friday of being more deeply admired by the nation he is opposing than the one he is leading. In Sweden, a country he left 23 years ago, he is seen as a guru who led football into the modern era. In England, by contrast, where he has no status as a tactical pioneer, he is just a respected coach who gets decent teams to play above themselves and earns a handful of extra points for having successfully tested himself abroad.
But in Sweden he and his friend Bob Houghton achieved nothing less than a revolution in the national approach to training and tactics. After Houghton had led Malmo to the European Cup final and Hodgson had won the Swedish league seven times, twice with Halmstad and with Malmo in five consecutive seasons, their style of play – based on intensive drills to create a solid defence and enable forwards to get beyond their markers – was adopted across the nation.
Hodgson's disciples included Lars Lagerback, Sweden's head coach from 2000-2009, and Sven-Goran Eriksson, both almost exactly the same age as the Englishman. But not Erik Hamren, Lagerback's 54-year-old successor and Hodgson's opposite number on Friday. Things have moved on in the country where the Englishmen made such a difference.
"In my opinion he is a really good coach and a very nice person, too," Hamren saidon Thursday. "He came to Sweden really unknown but gained a big name with the way he made results and brought some new influence into our football. We'll never forget him for what he's done."
Yet the old model has been dismantled. Although the former Rosenborg coach would not say so directly, the national team are attempting to play a more modern, fluid game. "When you work in football or whatever, you're always taking steps," Hamren said. "I try to do my job with my philosophy of how to play and how to get results, and I'm not thinking so much about the past. You have to learn a lot from the past, of course, but the most important thing is to deal with life just now."
But it is not just Sweden whose football was changed by Hodgson's presence, and where things have moved on. In 2000-01 his single season with FC Copenhagen saw him win the Danish title with his characteristic brand of football, again earning imitators as he changed attitudes to preparation and tactics. Now, however, only Copenhagen – the current champions – and Aarhus, who will play in next season's Europa League, still follow the Hodgson template.
When Morten Olsen, who is two years younger than the England manager, took over as Denmark's head coach in 2000, he brought with him lessons learned not just during his long and highly distinguished playing career but during a short spell at Ajax in which he won the Dutch double. Gradually, Olsen coaxed Denmark into playing with greater freedom, and most of the country's clubs followed suit.
More significantly, so did Denmark's age-group teams: the under-21s, under-19s, under-17s and so on. The Danish football association cannot afford a headquarters along the lines of St George's Park but it has a staff of coaches who ensure that – as French boys were taught at Clairefontaine during the era of Gérard Houllier, Aimé Jacquet and Roger Lemerre – their young players grow up operating on the same wavelength.
Which raises the important question of whether Roy Hodgson, for all his worldly sophistication and intellectual curiosity, is the man to be imposing his beliefs on the coming generations of England players, or whether his approach to football, symbolised for some observers by the presence in the squad of Carroll, belongs to the past. An honourable past, for the most part, but the past nonetheless. Read More
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