As England prepare to meet Sweden at Euro 2012, Peter Walker talks to those who have come under the manager's spell before
When Roy Hodgson's England take on Sweden in Kiev on Friday, Mats Jingblad will be among a number of Swedes for whom loyalties are decidedly split. "I still cross my fingers when a team managed by Mr Hodgson plays, and hope they do well," said Jingblad, who began his career under the young Hodgson, going on to represent his national side in the 80s. "He changed everything about the way I play football."
It is one of several paradoxes from Hodgson's six-week tenure in English football's most high-profile job that the reaction overseas has been, so far, notably warmer and more effusive than on the domestic front.
At home – perhaps uniquely among modern England managers – Hodgson never enjoyed much of a honeymoon period, not least because his appointment trumped the aspirations of Harry Redknapp, the media-anointed favourite. Three undefeated games into his regime, including a 1-1 draw against France in Monday's opening Euro 2012 fixture, and still Hodgson appears damned with faint praise. His team is, pundits agree, solid and well-organised given the limited preparation time, but some way from thrilling.
Asked on Tuesday about the famously cultured Hodgson being a fan of his books, even Martin Amis instead delivered a verbal kicking to how the manager "packs the defence and tries to scrape a point". Sneering, but not beyond comprehension given that the great majority of Hodgson's 36-year managerial career has been with overseas clubs or national teams and that his home ventures often ended badly, notably a miserable stint at Liverpool that saw Hodgson sacked in January last year after just 31 games.
In contrast, the bulk of Hodgson's former foreign charges, 10 clubs in six countries and three national teams, hold him in high regard, even Italy's Internazionale, where he endured distinctly mixed fortunes for a season-and-a-half from 1995. The England job, said an effusive statement from the Italian giants on Hodgson's appointment, was "just reward for a sincere and generous man who can be considered a true friend of Inter".
Such testimonies give Hodgson a low-key but apparently unshakeable self-regard. Now 64, with the magisterial bearing of, in one sportswriter's memorable phrase, "a very wise and courteous Victorian badger on his way to church", he appears able to shrug off criticism to concentrate on the job.
This sense of perspective is rooted in another Hodgson paradox. While he is a football obsessive who thinks deeply about the game, former players also describe an ability to both value them as people and take pleasure elsewhere, for example his much-reported fondness for literature and music.
Martin Dahlin was a raw 17-year-old striker when he moved from his tiny local club in southern Sweden to Malmö, who Hodgson led to a string of titles from 1985 to 1989. The English manager, Dahlin recalls, was key to shaping a career which included 60 Swedish caps.
"Mr Hodgson made me understand what it was all about, what I had to do to become a successful football player," said Dahlin, now 44 and a football agent. "He opened my eyes – I was a very talented youngster but maybe sometimes a bit lazy. I didn't understand how much work I needed to put into it.
"He had a lot of energy. I remember days when we came out early in the morning and it was raining and cold and he'd have a big smile on his face, clapping his hands, saying, 'Come on boys, what a wonderful day for a training session.' That was typical Roy, to always motivate us.
"One important thing that he does, which no other coach ever did, was to make us understand how lucky we were to be football players, to understand that we had the best job in the world, and to have perspective on this."
Early life
That perspective appears partly shaped by Hodgson's early life, and notably its major disappointment – his own failure to make it as a professional player.
Born two years after the second world war in badly bombed Croydon, south London, Hodgson learned football in the back garden of a converted house where one neighbour was Steve Kember, who went on to have a 15-year career with Crystal Palace, Chelsea and others. Hodgson's father was a bus driver while Kember's was a conductor, often on the same vehicle.
"All the local kids used to come virtually every day and we'd have a match in the back garden," said Kember. "There were a couple of trees at the back we'd use as goalposts."
After the local grammar school both made the Crystal Palace youth team. For Hodgson, though, this was the peak of his playing career. Kember recalls his childhood friend as talented but perhaps not sufficiently physical for the game of that era: "He was a very skilful player, if he lacked anything it was probably putting himself about and winning tackles. Things were different in those days. But he was good on the ball and a good passer of the ball."
Hodgson turned out for amateur sides, also taking his coaching badges and working as a PE teacher. These combined roles saw him make a first overseas foray, to apartheid South Africa, in 1973. He played briefly for Berea Park in the country's all-white football league, also coaching youth players. On becoming England manager Hodgson said he had only endured the "evil regime" out of desperation to play football. It remains an awkward CV detail.
Next came perhaps the most extraordinary chapter in Hodgson's career. In 1976, aged 28, he became manager of Halmstad, a club in west Sweden which had just escaped relegation by goal difference. Hodgson had no experience, getting the post on the recommendation of another former schoolmate, Bobby Houghton, now successfully managing Malmö. In Hodgson's initial season Halmstad won the club's very first title, a feat even he described immodestly as "water into wine".
Jingblad, now Halmstad's youth coach, was a young striker when Hodgson began his five-season stint. "He was only very young, 28 – we had some players who were well over 30," he recalled. "But from the very start he changed everything. It was our pre-season and in the past we did maybe a month of running and then 11 v 11 games. He had us training very intensively for two and a half, three hours a day. It was all tactical, about positioning – how you support each other and make sure you're in the right place. It was easily 10 to 15 years ahead of what we'd been doing before.
"It changed everything in Sweden. The philosophy of Hodgson is the philosophy of Sweden now."
Jingblad is not exaggerating. While the carefully drilled "English way" of Hodgson and Houghton met initial fierce resistance, by 1982, when another future England coach, Sven Göran Eriksson, won the Uefa cup with Gothenburg using their methods a national football culture was changed.
He also recalls the speed with which Hodgson learned the native language: "He took training in English, but within maybe two months if he was talking one-to-one with you he could do it in Swedish. He's clearly a very intelligent man."
Such is Hodgson's cosmopolitan background there is debate about precisely how many languages he speaks fluently. The consensus is four – Swedish, Norwegian, Italian and German – though some say Danish and French are also among those in which he is merely passable.
Man of culture
Equally commented on, perhaps reflecting football's philistine norms as much as Hodgson's exceptionalism, is his love of culture, ranging from the soul music of his youth to opera and literature.
Dahlin recalls how the younger Hodgson tried to pass on these pleasures at Malmö, with mixed results: "He sometimes tried to talk about cultural things but we were all very young and maybe not so interested. He talked about movies but the ones he enjoyed weren't really our kind of movies. When we played in Europe he would take some players round squares and monuments, to see things that we didn't really want to see".
Hodgson's first 30 years as a manager saw only two brief spells in England, an unhappy four months at cash-strapped Bristol City in 1982 and a season-and-a-bit at Blackburn Rovers, where a disastrous run of form saw him sacked. Elsewhere, he managed three other Swedish teams, mainly at Malmö, and at clubs in Switzerland, Denmark and Norway, as well as Inter.
For three years from 1992 Hodgson took charge of the Swiss national team, leading them to the 1994 World Cup, the country's first major tournament in almost 30 years. Hodgson is still regarded with extreme fondness, according to Peter Gilliéron, president of the Swiss FA. Hodgson's work had "a great impact on football in Switzerland", he told BBC Radio 4. "For us to qualify after 28 years was like England getting a title after a long time."
After less stellar spells leading the United Arab Emirates and Finland, Hodgson has remained in England since 2007, when he took charge of unfashionable Fulham, eventually leading them – to their fans' evident amazement – to the 2010 Europa league final, a run which prompted Liverpool to make their fateful call.
"We remember him extremely fondly," said David Lloyd, editor of the fanzine There's Only One F in Fulham. Those couple of years aren't the sort of thing that happen to a club like Fulham." Lloyd also recalls watching Hodgson speak to the press after a late goal secured Fulham's unlikely Premiership survival, an event he reputedly celebrated with a pot of tea and a book: "It was remarkable. He was so thoughtful about the other managers whose teams had been relegated. He was very humble. There's a lot of cynics in the press room but everyone seemed in awe. It was then I thought, hang on, this guy's got a real way about him."
Even a few weeks into the England job this "way" remains apparent. In contrast to the wag-heavy excesses of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, or the luxurious seclusion of South Africa four years later, Hodgson's team have been actively encouraged to explore their tournament base in Poland. Last week he led a group of players to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The players remain, at least publicly, free of divisions, quite an achievement given Ferdinand's popular status among his peers.
Even 25 years ago in Sweden, Jingblad remembers, Hodgson was an expert at keeping a squad content: "He was very good at building your self-confidence. Even if you weren't in the first-choice team he'd make you believe, 'I'm important and if I'm needed I know exactly what he wants me to do.'"
Like Jingblad, Dahlin will root for his home country on Friday, but not without reservations: "We have known him for so many years and everybody in Sweden is happy when he is successful." Read More
انسخ الكود التالى و ضعه فى موقعك او مدونتك.
