by The full-time whistle is blown at the Emirates: around 400 coaches, stewards, broadcasters, support staff and various other elements of the football background will flood the pitch. Roy Hodgson tucks his glasses into his coat pocket and stands on the touchline, gazing grimly at the tackle, looking – as he often does these days – like a man reminiscing about a sandwich he once had. in 1962. A cameraman gives the opportunity for the perfectly framed shot; he spins around Hodgson and catches him from behind, staring out at a distant flag in the Crystal Palace area:
OUT POTENTIAL
ON AND OFF THE PARK
WEAK DECISIONS
BRINGING THAT BACK
The natural tendency here, at least for the professional storyteller, is to superimpose some kind of human narrative on this conflicted tableau, to peer inside Hodgson’s brain and empty its contents onto the page. . Was he thinking about the end? Are you wondering if this great weathered profession has finally run its course? Maybe even absorb one last ray of football daylight, leaving one last memory, before disappearing down the tunnel and into the sweet embrace of oblivion.
Related: Roy Hodgson understands the ‘frustration and anger’ of Crystal Palace supporters
Sorry, no. “I was waiting for the players to come off the field,” he said when asked what was going through his mind at the time. Which is for Hodgson of course a flawless, flawless response to the brand. He has often admitted to a streak of arrogance, and the idea of deciphering or reading it – the idea that you, a non-Roy Hodgson, could truly understand Roy Hodgson’s mind – seems to offend you. him. In any case, if he was really thinking about something willing and meaningful, he would hardly have intended to share it with people like us.
In the current coaching landscape of the Premier League, with its staff of therapists and televangelists, this sort of thing stands out a lot more than it used to. Hodgson has no interest in feeding you sugar-coated bromides or taking you on a grand tour. He’s not trying to tell you a story or sell you a vision. It doesn’t even buy into one of football’s most sacred lies: that its fans are the lifeblood of the game whose inspiration and motivations must be questioned, let alone challenged. “They wouldn’t understand why I took Eze off the pitch,” he said of the boos that greeted his decision to take off Eberechi Eze in Wednesday’s FA Cup defeat at Everton.
Hodgson is likely to be sacked sooner rather than later. The wins have dried up – just one in every competition since the start of October. Football is getting worse. Much of the wit and energy has gone out of the machine, and Hodgson’s team is without thrust and energy essentially indistinguishable from a square dance.
The important thing is that the fans have had enough, and at this point it is no excuse to argue that Palace are still on the right track to stay up, especially when you take into account the weakness of three promoted teams and potential points. relegations to Everton and Nottingham Forest. Not to mention that this is the 11th consecutive season of Premier League football that they have never finished in the bottom five or got less than 40 points, and that in historical terms it means that we basically living through a palace. golden age.
None of this really matters. Football, at the most common level, is not an empirical exercise, but a torrent of emotions, and the sense of staleness and stasis that has set in at Selhurst Park is not the kind of thing you can really argue your way out of. Especially when you have a genial but often grumpy manager who describes the fans as “spoiled” in his more careless moments, claims he “won’t miss anything” when he’s gone, and when asked on what message he has for the players. after a 5-0 humiliation, he responds with the simple, encouraging words: “They have to stick to the work they are doing.”
And ironically, if the Palace board pulls the lever on Hodgson now, nobody can have too many complaints. Here the defense of set pieces was terrible, the attacking strategy threadbare, the space available behind the Palace defense – long before the two late counter-attacks from which Gabriel Martinelli scored – the sort of thing that makes opposition analysts stopping the tape and searching feverishly. Notebook.
But consider, too, that this is a squad that has seen little investment or valuable refreshments in recent years, forcing Hodgson to spend the last few months negotiating a cataclysmic injury crisis. Wilfried Zaha’s experience and invention have been inadequately replaced. And what is often called “long-term construction” often seems to be with a different ownership that, with one eye on a possible sale, has begun to abandon ambition for stasis.
Afterwards, Hodgson is asked if he still has the board’s support, and of course he knows what the question really means. “If you’re imagining it,” he said, rolling the “r” eagerly, “that must be a question for them, isn’t it?” And there is a small smile: as if the only thing worse than being sacked is to explain himself.
