sport news IAN LADYMAN: Roy Hodgson's Watford failure should make clubs think about ... trends now
Earlier his season, I was talking to a retired manager about what had made him keep working towards the end of a career when boxes had been ticked and good money had been earned.
'I needed something to get me out of the house,' he said, bluntly.
Another I once asked the same question to had said, for him, it had indeed been largely about the finance. Credit for the honesty, I guess.
Sir Alex Ferguson (left) and Sir Bobby Robson enjoyed significant success as older managers
Roy Hodgson joined Watford as a fire fighter but their survival hopes have been extinguished
I was wondering about this when reading reports yesterday of Watford's defeat at Crystal Palace.
Roy Hodgson, the Watford manager, started working in 1976 and will retire, he says, at the age of 74 when this season is done.
On Saturday at Selhurst Park, his team lost for the sixth successive Premier League game and are now relegated. Afterwards Hodgson was criticised for not applauding the travelling Watford fans. They were, he said, too far away.
Hodgson has been a terrific, brave, innovative manager over the best part of half a century and it doesn't seem terribly fitting for him to bow out in this way. He joined Watford because he genuinely believed he could save them.
Claudio Ranieri (centre) won the Premier League with Leicester but was later axed by Watford
But at Watford he has failed. Appointed as a fire fighter with the team already in trouble in January, Hodgson has managed to win only two of his 15 league games.
His time at Vicarage Road has been no more successful than, say, Sam Allardyce's spell at West Bromwich Albion last season (four wins from 25) or Claudio Ranieri's most recent two attempts to save ailing English clubs from relegation.
In November 2018, the Italian was hired by Fulham to stop the club's plummet towards the Championship and was sacked three months later after three wins from 17.
Then, in October last year, he was back at the age of 69. The club? Watford. Hired with the club in 15th position, he won twice before Hodgson was shuffled in to replace him in the New Year.
Sam Allardyce thrived when building clubs up and struggled when he tried to save West Brom
All of which makes me wonder not so much why managers keep returning to the game in their latter ages but why indeed clubs keeping hiring them.
Managers such as Hodgson and Allardyce have done much of their best work in environments where they were able to build something from the ground up. Allardyce was in his element at Notts County, Bolton and Blackburn Rovers. When he kept Sunderland up in 2015-16 he was hired in the October.
In football there seems to exist a school of thought that older,
