Roy Hodgson criticisms are valid – but his age should not come into it

When I think of Roy Hodgson as Liverpool’s manager, my mind is taken to a modest restaurant in the city’s Georgian quarter after he won his first match in charge of the club.

West Bromwich Albion had been beaten by a single goal at Anfield and Hodgson marked the occasion with a meal with Sheila, his wife, who was from Liverpool and came from a family of Evertonians.

Hodgson was fresh, or maybe a bit stale from work, and was still wearing his official Liverpool suit with the club’s badge on its pocket. His tie was red, and that made him stand out. I remember him standing up and jangling the keys in his pocket like a caretaker as he prepared to leave.

If he was expecting a warm reception from other diners, or even a hint of recognition, it never came. Nobody turned around. When I said to my now wife, “Look, there’s Roy Hodgson”, she carried on eating her bowl of pasta.

Had Hodgson been Rafa Benitez, the manager he’d succeeded, he’d have struggled to get out of the door. When Jurgen Klopp became Liverpool’s manager four and a half years later, he went for a drink at a bar just around the corner the night before his appointment and was mobbed.

Hodgson’s reign at Liverpool is the shortest of any manager in the club’s history. Barely four months after spotting him beside the cobblestones on a warm, slightly optimistic summer’s evening, he was sacked as the temperatures plunged at Ewood Park and a struggling Blackburn Rovers easily swept Liverpool aside. The soundtrack for his farewell from the away end was a rendition of “Hodgson for England” on repeat.

When the supporters of Blackburn, where he endured a difficult time in the late 1990s, started to tell him that he was getting sacked in the morning, Liverpool fans joined in and the club’s new owners Fenway Sports Group got the message.

If someone had told me upon his ignominious exit from Liverpool that, 13 years later, he would still be a Premier League manager, I’d have laughed. 

Yet, following the West Brom job and then four years with England, as well as a short period at Watford sandwiching two spells at Crystal Palace, he remains — for now, at least. Having secured Palace’s safety last season, he signed a one-year contract last summer, although the chances of him seeing that through seem to be fading, judging by the mood at Selhurst Park following Wednesday’s 2-0 defeat to Bournemouth. His reunion with Liverpool this weekend has an ominous feel to it. 

All that said, it is still remarkable that, at 76, Hodgson is still prepared to go through the daily grind of travelling, training drills, press conferences and all the onerous work that goes with being a Premier League coach. He is the oldest manager in the Premier League era by some distance, considering the second name on the list is Bobby Robson, who was already five years into retirement at the same age.

Before England, which ended in embarrassment after Iceland knocked them out of the European Championship in 2016, it seemed most people were on his side. To those admirers, he was an avuncular character with a wealth of experience that only a few English managers had accrued. He managed Inter Milan, you know?

In some minds, he just wasn’t suited to Liverpool, where he became a lightning rod for all of the club’s problems as it lurched towards financial ruin thanks to its desperate-to-sell-up owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

Hodgson has always been pricklier than most people like to think and he possesses an unusual sense of humour. At Anfield, it was clear that he rated himself and, occasionally, he came across as vain.

But considering how short his tenure was, he managed to rack up a fair few faux pas that could provide the contents for a reasonably long book.

The warning signs were there when he was asked during his press unveiling inside Anfield’s trophy room who his coaching inspirations were. Behind him were images of some of the most successful managers not just in Liverpool’s history, but in Britain’s, too. Rather than choose Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, or Kenny Dalglish (who he’d beaten to the job), his answer? “That would be Don Howe.”

There was no attempt to win over the locals and there was press conference after press conference when he said too little when he needed to say more and said too much when far less was required. If the club’s future was in jeopardy because of the actions of the owners, the manager, whose responsibilities are considered in Liverpool as being civic, was not a reassuring presence.

This was a period when social media was really taking off. Twitter, especially, had played a significant role in mobilising Liverpool supporters against Hicks and Gillett. Hodgson was packaged into the same swirl of resentment and essentially became a meme, the most memorable of which was a “comedy walkabout” featuring his assistant Sammy Lee to the tune of the British sci-fi sitcom series, Mike and Angelo.

On his departure from Liverpool, Hodgson was 63. In 2023 (excluding his own involvement at Palace), that age would make him the oldest manager in the Premier League by three years. West Ham United manager David Moyes is 60, then nine managers are in their fifties and the rest are either in their thirties or forties.

It is to Hodgson’s credit that he can still work at all, never mind in the Premier League where the pressure is extraordinary. Perhaps that conclusion alone might be considered unfair at a time when Joe Biden, the president of the United States, is five years older at 81, but Hodgson is an outlier, not just in English football but across Europe and beyond.

What is really unfair is some of the nasty ageism attached to criticisms of him, especially recently when Palace have struggled for form.

On Friday, Hodgson apologised for saying fans were being “spoilt” following the Bournemouth defeat, the third time in a little over a month he has said sorry for post-match comments.

In November, he apologised to Matheus Franca, Jesurun Rak-Sakyi and Naouirou Ahamada for saying after the defeat to Tottenham Hotspur that Palace “became much weaker” when he brought them on as substitutes.

Then, earlier this week, he said sorry for “making a somewhat flippant remark” over the injury status of Eberechi Eze, after Hodgson had appeared to imply there was a difference of opinion between Eze and the club’s medical staff over the severity of his ankle issue. Hodgson is no different from most managers in that he hates being told unexpected news by medics about a player’s health. 

Yet a lot of the reaction to his comments about Eze focused not on the wisdom of publicising an apparently private dispute, but instead veered into outright ageist insults. 

“Just let him retire FFS, man’s losing his memory,” read one reply.

“Marbles well and truly gone,” was another.

And rather more simply: “Old people’s home.”

Type “Hodgson” and “senile” into a search engine and you lose count of the comments. Most of them are not from Palace fans but some are, and this seems especially cruel considering the job Hodgson did last season when he stepped out of retirement and guided the team away from the relegation places.

In an era when there have been attempts to stamp prejudices out of football, ageism is one of the most indulged — treated as a joke, with little regard for the impact it may have on the subject. Perhaps it is not recognised as wrong because so few people over the age of 65 now work in the game, but that makes Hodgson’s enduring presence more remarkable.

There are all sorts of valid criticisms of him. This, surely, should not be considered one of them.

(Top photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)