sport news Roy Hodgson will bring a touch of class and decency back to the Premier League, ... trends now
It’s generally something shiny and thrilling that supporters look for when a new manager arrives and Roy Hodgson, in all honesty, is neither of those.
‘There’s not going to be rainbows and blue skies and rose-coloured spectacles,’ he once observed, when asked if a top-half finish might be within Crystal Palace’s range of expectations. ‘I never use the word “confident”,’ he said last year amid the fight to save Watford, which he lost.
He arrives back at Palace, aged 75, with the club either 12th, or three points above the relegation zone, depending on how full your glass is. A mere four points separate nine teams and that entire chunk of the Premier League is in a state of paralysis. Clubs won’t commit to new contracts until the relegation picture becomes clearer.
Hodgson won’t set the house on fire at his press conference but he will restore a sense that age and experience have a place in a managerial profession which so often now seems the preserve of the young. He will also bring a fundamental humanity which seems increasingly lost amid the controversies and egos, pomposity and posturing of the modern managerial game.
Class has seemed in short supply at times this season, though the carousel of the Premier League whirls so fast that some of the vicious little moments have passed almost without comment.
Roy Hodgson's return to Crystal Palace as their new manager was confirmed on Tuesday
Jurgen Klopp’s personalised criticism of a respected Liverpool journalist at Wolves was poisonous. Pep Guardiola’s sneaky little moment of mockery for Steven Gerrard was despicable.
Those interventions would have been bewildering to Hodgson, for whom bursting along the touchline, letting everyone see how very furious you are, is also an alien concept.
Aleksandar Mitrovic’s disgraceful behaviour at Old Trafford was clearly a consequence of having Marco Silva in his eye-line, hammering the referee.
I heard talkSPORT’s Jamie O’Hara, whose work I like a lot, say that young players would not be influenced by this conduct. Hard to agree with that.
When it was announced the other week that junior football referees would be wearing body cameras, no one batted an eyelid.
The old-school decency and courtesy Hodgson brings have never seemed more needed.
Class has seemed in short supply at times this season with Pep Guardiola (left) and Jurgen Klopp's (right) vicious little moments passing almost without comment
Aleksandar Mitrovic’s disgraceful behaviour at Old Trafford was clearly a consequence of having Marco Silva (centre) in his eye-line, hammering the referee before he was sent off
Antonio Conte last week publicly castigated Tottenham players whose arrivals he sanctioned
He has certainly had unflattering moments. A press conference in Chantilly, north of Paris, at which he reluctantly appeared after England’s exit from the 2016 Euros at the hands of Iceland, did not cover him in glory.
‘I don’t want to come here as Uriah Heep and in a bolshy way,’ he said. In a bolshy way. It’s fair to say that his best work has come in more modest surrounds.
But while many would never have recovered from that excruciating episode, Hodgson did.
Without recrimination or self-pity, he climbed back up and started again. Too much is made of courage in sport but Hodgson displayed it in the aftermath of that brutal public humiliation, seven years ago.
I remember him telling me, during a barbecue at England’s team base in Hertfordshire before the 2012 Euros, that he had been reading the novel Stoner, written in the 1960s by the American John Williams.
Hodgson resigned from the England job after they were knocked out of Euro 2016 by Iceland
It is the story of an unsensational academic who is patient, earnest, enduring and steadfast in equal measure, and who pursues and finds a cherished inner space as the world crowds in.
That has
