Roy Hodgson returns to the bench. The thousand lives and the great mystery of the Bard of English football

At least according to him, already what had happened five and a half years ago, in September 2017, could very well not have happened. “They called me, I certainly didn’t apply. For me it was all over after the experience on the England bench ended. Roy Hodgson he had accepted the idea of ​​enjoying his retirement after the criticisms he suffered following his elimination in the round of 16 of the 2016 European Championships against Iceland. However, when Crystal Palace called him to replace Frank de Boer it took him a few hours to change his mind. He set aside his slippers and slipped back into his overalls. Still on the sides of the field, forty years after the first time.

Can you really say no to your first great love? Roy Hodgson didn’t. Because he has always heard those colors from him. He had dressed them in the early sixties throughout the youth process. He will still see them up close. Crystal Palace have recalled him to replace Patrick Vieira (who had picked up 27 points in 27 days, only three more than the relegation zone), he replied in the affirmative. Seventy-five years, seventy-six in August, are not too many, they are never too many to say yes to great love. A bit like Zdenek Zeman. Feeling people in their own way.

And so Roy Hodgson finds himself still in the game, at the umpteenth championship substitution, during his career. He has never been one of those who needs physical preparation, to teach a method, time to develop innovations, schemes, tactical alchemies. He has always come to terms with men first, with their motivations, then he has chosen the best way to make them perform at their best, or at least to do as little damage as possible. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes less, almost always he brought home the bare minimum. Also for this reason the English federation chose him to lead the national team. For his ability to connect with the players.

There is a very English face Roy Hodgson and an enviable mimicry. Guy Ritchie has repeatedly tried to convince him to act, he has always politely refused. His gaze is often lost in who knows what Roy Hodgson thoughts, perhaps due to dark circles or cheeks collapsing dams, but “his eyes are smart, shrewd, the eyes of someone you know you can’t fool”. This is how Tim Sherwood described his former coach at the time of Blackburn (he was the captain of that team) commenting on Sky the news of Hodgson’s return to the bench, then of Watford, in January 2022.

Just Blackburn in 1997 was the first English team to be coached by Roy Hodgson after the failure at Bristol City in 1982. And it is in these fifteen years spent away from the United Kingdom that Roy Hodgson’s success must be sought. A success that has little or nothing to do with football.

Guy Ritchie was right: Roy Hodgson would have been perfect in a film, in any film. Because he is a brilliant man, with a ready joke, who generates immediate sympathy, because above all he has succeeded in convincing an entire country, indeed an entire kingdom, that he had been kicked out of the door by a football movement that he did not recognize his genius. He did it with the style and class of a Clarke Gable, certainly not with the ways of a Mr. Bean, the character of Rowan Atkinson to whom he was compared by the Inter fans during his experience, not too positive, between November of 1995 and May 1997 (and then between May and June 1999).

Roy Hodgson with brilliant intelligence and superfine irony told of his almost obligatory choice to expatriate to Sweden, of the championship won with Halmstad that had barely survived the year before, of the encore in 1979 with a totally distorted team. He spoke of his exemption from Bristol and his return to Sweden, of the other two victories in Allsvenskan with Malmö FF, of the cups in Scandinavia and then in Switzerland with Neuchâtel Xamax, of the “miracle” of the qualification of the Swiss national team for the 1994 World Cup ( really a great success, considering that the Swiss team had been missing from a final phase of the world championships since 1970).

Especially after that American World Cup, for England and for English football, Roy Hodgson was exotic, like the pavé for the Italians of cycling, that is, that something distant that attracts you irrepressibly. He had really accepted the idea that he was a genius not understood who ended up who knows how far from the motherland. An exoticism reinforced by the choice to ignore the requests of a couple of big English clubs in the summer of 1994, remain at the helm of the national team and then offload it to go to Inter.

It was at that exact moment that Roy Hodgson became in the eyes of football fans in England, and especially many football managers, a regretted, great manager that the United Kingdom had failed to understand. Above all a coach who was never really questioned.

And this despite the fact that he has never won anything in England, in the other European championships in the continental cups. Also failing in all competitions with the English national team. Out in the quarter-finals at the European Championships in Poland and Ukraine in 2012 and those in France in 2016 and failing even to qualify for the round of 16 at the World Cup in Brazil 2014. Everything went under the radar. Roy Hodgson has nevertheless remained a coach, one that the United Kingdom has never understood.

Now he’s back on the bench, with his gentle manners and the gab of a seasoned playwright. Chapeau, Mr. Hodgson.