Roy Hodgson - Manager

Poor fella, shouldn’t feel to sorry for him as his pipe Tobacco will still be moist and slippers will still be warm by the same log he put on the fire before coming here and I’m sure his pay out will keep his mrs happy but at this rate he’ll be gone by Easter.

Maybe they’ll try and persuade Ray to stay on for a season in the championship


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Love this quote from Hodgson. He’s basically calling out the forward players.


We can’t do much more than put the attackers on the field. The bottom line is that when they're on the field and they are very good players – as everyone seems to think they are – unfortunately, when they get the ball at their feet they've got to do something with it. You know, we can't unfortunately, magic up ways in which they can score goals and create goal chances just by giving them the magic word in their ear. The bottom line is, Maupay didn’t have many chances in the game but the one he had he took. We need to hope our front players - everyone tells me are very dangerous, very good players, got enormous threat – they’ve got to do that for the team for the club because unfortunately there’s no amount of coaching we can do that’s gonna change anything in that respect.

 

It's certainly an interesting quote. I can see two sides to this.

Option 1 : Our forwards are playing as individuals. They don’t look up to make a pass. If they do make a pass it’s either under hit or over hit. They don’t make the right runs off the ball to receive a pass.

Option 2 : The team needs to be set up to allow forward players to err..., get forward and support each other! Often, a player finds himself alone in the opposition box whereas other teams will have a posse of ‘em driving into dangerous positions.

Maybe a bit of both? Chicken or egg?

 

If Dennis scores rather than hit the bar, we probably get a point and Roy does not have a point to make. I think Maupays goal was more a fluke hit and Dennis an unlucky miss.

The main thing is we probably will have a different frontline next season responding on the training pitch to a different voice and different magic word in the ear.

 

Dennis should have scored rather than hitting the bar (off target) so it perfectly proves Roy’s point.

 

Will never take Maupay over Dennis! And Maupay will never score a goal playing in front of negatively set up midfield of Cleverley, Sissoko, Kayembe and Kucko. Am beginning to think Roy might end up being the worst manager we will have this season.

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He went for the spectacular and lost, when there was a massive space to the side of the keeper begging for the ball to be passed into.

 

Yes Woy the reason we can't score has nothing to do with the fact that you set us up so negatively and our midfield players very rarely go past the half way line to support our forward players. Oh and we also use two defensive minded slow and ageing midfielders as our wingers. Also Maupay miss kicked the volley and it come off his shin and fortunately for him flew into the top corner.

 

Sack him.

 

If he thinks just putting “attacking players on the field” is enough to win games and nothing else, then he’s a bigger moron than I already thought. What a truly woeful appointment this has been. Get rid now I say

 

Coming across a bit of a tw*t is old Roy.

 

This appointment is not going well!

 

For a guy that must have so much football knowledge he's coming across as completely clueless. Either he doesn't give a **** and has given up already or he actually believes what he's saying, which is truly worrying.

 

To be fair to Roy, he doesn’t strike me as someone who would take this job purely for the money, and he certainly doesn’t need it, having earned more than enough over his long footballing career to set him up for life even if he lived another 74 years. There’s a clear reason why he was persuaded out of retirement, his passion for football which in someone like him never dies combined with his urge to take up a new challenge. He wouldn’t have taken up this offer if he didn’t truly believe he could keep us up, so that in itself offers a glimmer of hope, even if admittedly it’s a pretty thin straw to clutch to.

Also just looked up his record at Fulham the season they pulled off their great escape, and they had exactly the same number of points at the same stage.

 

He's worked with the bulk of them for a few weeks now, so we can only really hope that he thinks that kind of public 'motivation' is the kind of thing that personalities like Dennis and JP will respond to, given his personal experience of dealing with them.

Let's all pray they don't read it the wrong way and see it as an excuse for even more 'Let me just try and dribble through 6 players again' bullshyttery.

 

Kevin Day was on talk sport again yesterday, he said as far as Roy is concerned you can never be too negative, he also said he will never throw his hands up say he’s wrong about anything, there will always be an excuse.

So again, you may not like it and understandably so, but he’s just being the guy he’s always been, he’s not suddenly changed because he’s rocked up at Watford, quite the opposite.

As always the problem is the people in charge of making the appointments, not the actual person being appointed.

 

This plays into my belief.

That Gino - if there was even a vague plan around the appointment - got blinded by the desire for a clean sheet and greater defensive stability, yet completely ignored what that might do to the rest of the team. We needed someone to come in and turn defeats into wins. It feels like with Hodgson, we have got someone who will turn defeats into smaller defeats and perhaps the odd draw/win…and it’ll be nowhere near enough. If Gino wasn’t going to invest properly in January, then he had to suspend the need for solidity for 6 months, in favour of someone who would get all our best players on the pitch and get a tune from them. Sure we’d conceded and the defensive errors would likely continue. But we might just get enough down the other end to make survival possible. That isn’t going to happen with Hodgson unless he abandons everything he’s about.

There also clearly isn’t a thorough ‘application and interview’ process. It’s a quick phone call to someone and asking them if they fancy it.

 

He's certainly not the major problem at the club but doesn't change the fact his post-match comments are very weird.

Maybe it's only taken him 3 weeks to realise this is the worst group of players he's ever played with which would be saying something.

 

Are they though? If you look back across his career he’s given plenty of weird interviews, even the one when he got wound up about HH was a bit odd. We’re obviously focused much more on what he’s saying and how it relates to what we know about our own squad that we wouldn’t really know about Palace etc. In as much detail. Everything I’ve heard about him rings true in what we’ve seen and heard so far. They had Kevin Day in when he was appointed and he said don’t expect a new manager bounce, expect 20% possession and if you’re losing 1-0 don’t expect him to go mad to get a goal back. All of that has been bang on.

I think he was just a desperate appointment, but I don’t think he’s been anything different what he’s always been at any other club. Maybe he’s just making weird comments a bit earlier because of how bad he’s realised our squad is.

 

I always think of Tony Adams as the classic proof that a top player who could organise players on the pitch magnificently won't necessarily translate that into becoming a great manager. Keane, Bryan Robson, Ince were all givne the chance to manage due to their playing leaderhip styles but all were far less successful that one would think if there was any correlation.

 

I'm sure I read that other applied for the job within a day or so but were told it had already been filled.

 

Yeah it was Leventhal - said that an ‘ex-international Manager’ was readying an application.

 

There are plenty of times though when he's shown himself capable of getting wins by being more attacking and throwing caution to the wind, eg the great escape at Fulham, their European adventure two seasons later, scoring three goals per game in qualifying while at England (including winning ten out of ten in Euro 2016 and big wins against Moldova and Montenegro who aren't exactly whipping boys). That description of him being a cautious manager does apply somewhat to his later seasons at Palace, but even there after going ten away games without scoring (four of them were under Allardyce and De Boer in fairness) they only failed to score in one game in 15, and they finished 2017/18 strongly to end up midtable.

Admittedly, the second half against Brighton where we had Sarr, Dennis, King and Pedro together for the first time in a long time (and for only the third time and the longest this season) wasn't encouraging, but let's see how he does when he starts Sarr in easier games and hopefully he'll be more attack-minded.

 

He has only had 3 games, let's give Roy a few more games before we judge him

 

But football waits for no one - the quick demise of Mourinho and others shows that. Benitez, Ranieri. There’s more. These managers that were once at the top and proved themselves capable at the top level has seen the game move beyond them and the way they do things.

 

Maybe he's just gobsmacked at how poor our squad seem to be at doing the simple basics...

 

Quite agree with him. This is a limp squad who seem mentally weak - they need to back up the talk. I understand the argument that we didn't create much, but the forward players didn't do much to change that.

I agree with Hodgson but it is a dangerous game with modern day 20 something year olds to try and blame them - it is more likely to cause a flood of tears rather than a strong reaction to prove him wrong.

 

Terry Venables ?

 

Although he never actually put attacking players on the pitch he played Cleverley and Kucka as wingers instead of Sarr, Pedro, Cucho, Kalu. We basically just let Brighton have the ball whenever they wanted with 3 or 4 yards space to pick a pass until they inevitably scored.

 

I can kind of see it from both points of view. Latter day Roy’s tactics at Palace were keep it tight and hope to nick a goal, they always had a lot less possession then the opposition, whether you agree with that or not that’s how he he operated. We did look pretty hopeless in the final third and that was mostly due to Dennis always over complicating things, or none of them being able to make a simple pass to one another or a through ball, make an intelligent run etc. Dennis hitting the bar wasn’t unlucky, he missed an open goal. When we did get forward it was honestly like watching drunks play football, so I get what Roy is saying to an extent because they all just looked so hopeless and incapable of nicking a goal.

 

Not exactly an open goal, he had to get it through four Brighton players and the right side of the keeper (see 1:21 of the below video) - I wouldn't call that more than a half chance that came from a lucky bounce off Welbeck. Still our best chance of the game though, which shows how impotent we are in attack at the moment.