Roy Hodgson reflects on highs and lows of his incredible 47-year long career | The Overlap

0:04Is this your last two and a half weeks in football? Could well be Gary. I'm on the touchline, I'm watching a game where I don't understand what the hell some of these players are doing. There's nothing that I would suggest. Did it hurt you? Of course it did. It was the second time I'd been sacked. I was there with them, but I had no effect on them whatsoever.

0:30In both tournaments you don't do anywhere near as well as you should do, then unfortunately that's a failure. I seem to have been forgiven even when Aldo gives me a hug every now and again. Am I talking too much? No, no, I'm enjoying this.

0:50Roy, so you've been in football 47 years, and I'm just looking at that calendar there that you've got on the wall, and it's set out exactly what you've got on in this next two and a half weeks before your final game against Nottingham Forest at home. Is this your last two and a half weeks in football? I just looked at it and thought, that can't be right. It could well be, Gary, who knows? I mean, it's what I intend to do this year. I made the mistake when I left Palace four years ago of accepting that people were retiring me and I sort of accepted it. Yeah, OK, I'm retiring. But then, of course, I came back.

1:27I went to Watford and people sort of forgave me that. But then I've done it again now after that retirement. So I've spoken with Jo and I've told her I'm going to answer all questions now that the future will be what it is and what will happen will happen. But I want to leave at least the option that if something comes along like this came along for me and I want to do it, I don't have to feel guilty about saying, well, by the way, I've actually retired, so I'm coming out of retirement to do it. I don't know if there's any reason really if you feel fit enough, well enough, competent enough to actually say I am retiring.

2:06But of course quite often, you've been in it a long time, 47 years of coaching and management is a hell of a long time so perhaps you deserve a rest and feel you want to take a rest. But I don't know that one should retire oneself because if I'd have done that I would have missed out on this opportunity which I've really enjoyed. You've had obviously a lot of jobs in football. What you learnt from that job in a good way and what you took away from that job that you maybe think, well I wouldn't do that again or the mistake that I made there. So let's start in your early years over in Sweden where you won titles and you were very successful.

2:39What was it in those early years that you felt I'm a lot better at now and I made lots of mistakes? There's no doubt that there were periods of times then where I didn't pay enough attention to what the players were thinking, what the players needed. It was far too much, this is what they've got to have and this is... Or a dictatorship. Yes, it was much more, which was totally wrong of course. And then of course there were times I think where at Malmö I allowed complacency to set in because for five years we were so dominant and it seemed to me good players just seemed to be popping up all over the place.

3:18I don't know then that I was as correct as I should have been in many situations in controlling that aspect of it. What do you mean by complacency? What specific examples could you give us? It became a little bit of a self-playing piano, I think, Malmeth F for me and I think that I allowed Malmeth F to become a self-playing piano. I didn't probably work hard enough on the future of Malmeth F and making certain that those players were getting the sort of guidance after five years that they were getting in the first year. I don't know, I mean I'm trying to find things, I wasn't that conscious of it at the time, but I'm trying to find things to answer your question really.

3:58But it was definitely the right thing to do to move to Switzerland because I think that after what then was 12 years in Sweden and largely successful, it needed to be another platform for the for my work and I needed to sort of start needing to think again and not just being able to rely on the reputation you've built up and perhaps started to believe even that well this is the only way to do things, you know it's been so successful, this is it, you know I've cracked the formula. But in football you never crack a formula, because there is no formula, you can't crack the formula. In those early days, I think I remember you telling me, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, you were playing quite an aggressive 4-4-2 offside trap system.

4:44Oh yes, absolutely. I mean, that's the famous story when Clough came to watch my team, Harmsdale, which at the time were top of the league, playing Malmo, who were second in the league before the 1979 Cup final. And someone said to him after, what did you think of the game, Brian? He said, what game? They said, well, what, you've just been watching? He said, I didn't watch a game. He said, I just watched 20 people scattered around the centre circle and if I'd have thrown a hang with it I'd have killed a lot of them. At the time Bob and I were mortified by the comments that we thought was unbelievably harsh as it were, especially as we were criticised anyway for playing that sort of football.

5:24But when I think back on it, it was not only an amusing comment, it was probably a correct comment as well. But we were far too young and arrogant to accept it. We thought he should never have said something as disrespectful as that. Take us on to Switzerland, particularly the international job was where you took Switzerland to their first major tournament in 94. 94, yeah, and then 96 we qualified for the Euro 96. I didn't take that one, I left after the qualifying to go to Inter. And just talk to me about that job in terms of what that gave you and what that did for you and what you learnt about international football but also what you felt as though you learnt from that job from a negative perspective anything that you feel that you know when you look back an experience I did a terrible thing I remember early on in 90 it was in 92 I mean I've been again success goes to your head and so you go into the job sometimes thinking that you know you're you're a bigger person than the people around you which you should never do and I won't mention the player's name but we went on an international friendly even before the qualifiers started in 92 and I found out this player had misbehaved in some way that I didn't agree with.

6:46Put out for a drink? I won't, I won't wait for what he'd done but he, and I played the big shot and left him out of the squad as a result of it because I'm making it clear that you know if you're a good boy. Was he a famous player at the time? Yeah, he was one of the more famous ones, although Switzerland, to be fair, didn't have that many favourites players, so it wasn't like leaving the line, I wasn't doing that to a line or message, don't get me wrong. But I often think, I had to go back to him later on before the qualifiers in 96 because our centre forward, Schapritsar, got badly injured and he was going to miss all the qualifiers.

7:23I had to go back with sort of humble pie and ask him to come back and to his great credit, he did and forgave me what now I would regard as a cardinal sin. That, you know, if a punishment was necessary to be meted out, it wasn't that level of punishment that I thought I would give him. Was that you stamping your control and trying to sort of... It was a stamping of a control. It was a way of showing off, if you like, that I can stamp my authority. My advice would be, once again, because you told me as we started to speak that this might be of some value to coaches starting off, I would advise you to be very, very careful before you start giving yourself those airs and graces because at the end of the day, you can only ever be a good coach if you've got players who are going to work for you and play for you and win matches for you.

8:17If those players are not going to win matches for you, you will never be regarded as a good coach. Who do you regard as all the best coaches in the world? we always quote the ones who've got the most successes, the most trophies, the European Cup winners. They're the ones we go to. We don't talk about the guy who can't put those achievements or accomplishments on the table. But you might more likely be the guy who can maybe never put those accomplishments on the table. So you've got to make sure that you know that the people you've worked with when you've left the job will always say he did the job correctly, even though he can't perhaps prove that he was good because he's got no medals to show.

9:02I hate that one, no silverware. Winning silverware can be a matter of good fortune. I mean, a guy I like and a friend, Mauricio Pochettino, I heard that about him. How many times did he lose semi-finals or finals in the Champions League? I don't remember the game he lost in the Champions League, but I'm pretty certain if you analyse that game with a fine-tooth comb, you could find a way of saying, well, there, but for the grace of God, he would have won it, and he'd have had the silverware. You've got to be more generous in your appraisal of someone's job than just, well, has he won a trophy? If not, you know, Roberto Di Matteo is one of the best coaches we've ever seen in this country, because he won a European Cup with Chelsea.

9:48And he's good. My point there is that Roberto's career as a manager was short. He didn't have a long management career. I don't think he wanted a long management career. I'm in no way criticising Di Matteo. I said he wasn't good. But what I am saying, if it's purely silverware, then he and there will be lots of other names you could mention. My memory is not so good these days. I can fish these other names out of the top of a hat. Talk to me about Inter Milan and your experiences there. Obviously you worked with some absolutely fantastic players there, as you've done throughout your career. But there you had Roberto Carlos, Zanetti, Bergami I think was there at the time.

10:31Brasilia Ronaldo was there in the second period. Yeah, that was the second period. My two years, if you like, when I was taken from the Swiss national team to go there, which was about five or six games into the season I think it was. That team didn't have quite as many big names as the team I found when I went back when they weren't having a very good time. A bit of a job like this one. I got taken in in March and asked to see the team through to May because the president, I think, probably erroneously, was also believing that the team was on a big slide and that things were looking a bit dangerous.

11:08I mean, it couldn't possibly be dangerous with the sort of players we had. but it was a difficult that was a difficult job that taught me a lot of things I got that one wrong as well because you know instead of going in there with enormous humility I was still suffering from having been sacked for the first time in my career at Blackburn and I went there with totally the wrong attitude really are we into the second time oh yeah I mean that was a disastrous was that where a birth or cows from a Brazilian I saw it I mean I'm famous in inter for having sold Roberto Carlos. Go on, tell us the story about selling Roberto Carlos.

11:40My effigy is probably hung up around a lot of places there because in that year he was perhaps the one name we had that year apart from the famous ex-players like Bianchi and Bergami and Paganin and Festa and Berti and Fontalan and a young Zanetti. Zanetti came the same time as me. Zanetti came as a make-weight for another player called Sebastian Rambert. They wanted Sebastian Manbert from Argentina and they took Zanetti as well so they'd have a bit of company. Zanetti turned out to be one of the best players Inter's ever seen and Manbert lasted a few months. So that was that team. But the second team, and in the second year that team was improved by some famous signings.

12:22We signed, we had Paul Ince to be fair, Paul was there, but we signed Diorcaev and we signed Sforza, we signed Wintour, we signed Anglomar, we signed Zamorano. So there was a few in the second year that was probably more final. That's the year we got to the European final. The final, yeah. But it's when I went back that they had all the, that's when you had the Navarro's and the Signione's and Paolo Sosa's and Pirlo. It sounds like I'm showing off here now, but I mean, I was there with them. but I had no effect on them whatsoever. And furthermore, I would doubt if any of them have got a kind word to say about me.

13:10I was actually quite surprised now in Qatar, you know, they're now half of these are working with... FIFA. FIFA, you know, so they're... and I bumped into them a few times on each occasion, I was expecting them to say, even Simeone said, you know, happy memories together. and I'm like, you don't mean that, Diego, you know, it's nice of you to say so. But that's when the beauties are getting old. What were you like though there, Roy? What were you like in Inter Milan the second time? You've just been sat by Blackburn, you go back, you've got all these amazing players. I wanted to show I was a good coach, but they didn't want to be coached.

13:43They just wanted to be looked after and, you know, they wanted someone to pick the right team. They wanted someone to sympathise with them when the crowd were getting on at them. There were one or two players who were actually a little bit concerned about being picked, really, because they didn't like that feeling when they came out onto the field with all the crowd booing and jeering when their lane was announced. So who would that be at that time out of those players? Who was getting criticism? Well, there was a few because they'd had a bad time when I came. I mean, Andrea Pirlo hardly played.

14:13I mean, we had four number tens, didn't we? We had Paolo Sosa, we had Andrea Pirlo, we had a guy called Zain Maria. Jorka, they're the four. Then there was Diego Simeone, then there was Ronaldo, and there's a guy who came in I think. It's a lot of attacking talent. Oh, blind me. The first game, am I talking too much? No, no, I'm enjoying this. Anyway, we play this game at the Stadio Olimpico in Roma, and honestly, I mean, less of a Roy Hodgson team than into that day you could never have seen in a million years. We won it 5-4 with a diving Simeone header in the last minute and I'll never forget the dressing room afterwards that people piled in.

14:59Massimo Maratti came in with some of his advice. They were so happy because they saw this as well we're okay, these three points will lift us high enough, we don't have to worry anymore. And we were thinking this is crazy. I'm on the touchline, I'm watching a game where I I don't understand what the hell some of these players are doing. Nothing that I would suggest. We win it. But I do remember also Badger was absolutely magnificent that day. He was sitting in a corner. Players were jumping around in the river bed. I was quiet. I just went up to him. I said, I've got to say one thing. I said, I'd have paid money to what you pay tonight.

15:33That was such a complete performance. I'd have happily paid money for that rather than have the privilege of being on the front line. So it started well, but it went very much downhill from there onwards really. But I seem to have been forgiven, even Ronaldo gives me a hug every now and again. I think Roberto Carlos is the only one if he would turn his back on me if I saw him in the street. Why did you sell him? It was money really, and in that team, you know, Giuseppe Paganin, Pagliuca wasn't really sellable, Giuseppe Bergami wasn't Pagliuca, wasn't Festa, wasn't Roberto was. Nicola Berti not really, well Fontalan no, Ince we could have probably sold him but he'd only just come to the club, Salvatore Frasi, Zanetti just come to the club and then there was Branco and Gantz.

16:24It was a good team I thought but I mean we didn't have a lot of players there, we'll put them on the market, we'll get a load of money back. The one we could get money for was Roberto so I went along with that really but of course when he was sold and the shit hit the fan then they weren't standing up and saying we persuaded avoiding to do this it was like well he sold him dumb and dumb yeah so it was my effigy the man who sold were better it's like the man who shot liberty valentine what system did you play with pierlo baggio georgef simeon is amurano and brazilian ronaldo well it's difficult we we um andrea didn't play andrea i mean andrea sub yeah he was one of the soldiers he was a number i mean he was signed as a number 10 that was his only position I mean the Pirlo that became a great player Carlo Ancelotti reinvented him as a central midfield player but the idea then was that he would play just behind the centre forward somewhere and so we really wanted to play with with two forwards ideally but our problem was getting the we had Zanetti who would do the job on one side he would go out but then we had three central midfield players and none of them really wanted to push out wide you know Paul wasn't going to do it Winter wasn't going to do it Jorke everyone wasn't going to do it and Jorke didn't want to play behind Zamorano either really if he'd have really wanted to do that and done that job then we could have put someone on this side here who would have done the job for us it would have been a better balanced team.

18:01Talk to me about Liverpool Roy in terms of how you found it there obviously a passionate city big club and it didn't last very long there. What do you take away from that job in terms of how it was there? I went to a club really where there was a change of ownership and no one quite knew what the new owners were going to want. And also, I went to a club, again, arrogance is probably the wrong word, but believing that I know that there's large swathes of fans who don't think that I'm the right man for the job, that Kenny Dalgleese is the man that they want to come back and do it. Did you sense that straight away?

18:38Oh, yeah, that was clear straight away. And it was made even more clear when the new owners came in because the first thing they went, they went through all these various spirit shankly groups, etc., and canvassed them. We weren't winning. You know, I'd have had to have any chance of success at all. I'd have had to go in there and, from the first games, start winning and getting results and playing some football rather than struggling, as we were, you know, near the middle of the table. and in the same way I suppose Liverpool were doing until recently. They were a really good run. So it was always going to be an uphill battle for Matt.

19:17But I think probably the most pertinent thing, and I wasn't aware of it really at the time, but Jamie Carragher said to me on the last day, he said, do you know what your big mistake was here? I said, no, go on, tell me. He said, we've been coached, he said, we've had Benitez for two and a half years and you know it's been pretty rigid the coaching the messages and I mean Jamie like that I mean Jamie is a big fan of Benitez so he wasn't it wasn't a criticism in any way but he said he said you've come in and you've done the same thing he said you'd have been better off adopting a different approach and that brings us back really to you know your first question of either day when you came in here was your first thoughts to do this or that but I didn't have that I had right this has worked well at Fulham you know it worked well at Blackburn people accepted that we were going to be very structured and organized and play that type of football so I'm going to do that here and we're going to get better because what where our faults are we're going to organize and structure ourselves out of them but maybe it's not always possible to do that.

20:32So what you were sort of saying was that they wanted more freedom, they wanted just the go-and-play type. Probably more of that, you know, probably more training sessions whereby they weren't required to concentrate and focus and take on board information. Maybe they wanted a few sessions where there was more play and the coaching would have been more subtle. I think if I was to think back to the type of coaching sessions we did there, I wouldn't do that again. I've evolved a little bit from that and tried to find a way of getting the same messages, keeping the same philosophy, but maybe in a slightly different way.

21:13But again, it's wisdom with hindsight. It's always very easy to get your decisions right with hindsight and especially you don't necessarily change your moods either the the way you're feeling about yourself the way you're feeling about things then maybe it's not how i'm thinking about it now i'm just wishing that i had the sort of wisdom i can use to answer your questions now then but i didn't have it did it hurt you yeah oh yeah of course it It was the second time I'd been sacked. Blackburn, of course, was the first. This one was the second time. And I was just very fortunate, really, that West Brom, who were very, very good to me and where once again I could sort of rekindle, if you like, A, the love of the game, and B, get the love of the fans and the club back.

22:06I was very doubtful about whether I want to do that. but luckily Dan Ashworth worked hard to persuade me you should do it and it saved me in a way because it got me back onto a track which I thought I should be on and also I was able I think to learn a lot of lessons then it sort of it rebooted me to some extent and I think sometimes in life, if you're going to have a long, long spelling coaching, you need rebooting from time to time. And it's good if you've got some people around you who can help you reboot. So let's just talk about England, and obviously you have four years with England from 2012 to 2016.

22:50What are your memories? What are your thoughts? Do you still think about England? Do you still think about the tournaments? Do you still think about what happened in the job? Well, you think about the tournaments, because that was where the failure occurred really. I don't think we did too badly in the qualifiers and I don't think we did too badly in our approach to the job in terms of trying to rejuvenate what was quite an ageing team when we took over in 2012, albeit if you talk about tournaments that was our most successful tournament although I do remember that game against Italy where we were so totally and utterly outplayed really but we got it through the penalties but you know it was pretty clear I think to us then that this team does need some rejuvenation.

23:41It was the end of the golden generation. They were good players. I still think that you know if you say to me who are some of the best players you work with I would revert to that team and name some of those players because they were really good and then when the tournaments came around we just we just didn't find I mean tournament football that really is the ultimate knockout football. And we didn't find the performances in those tournaments, I think, that we perhaps had in some of the matches going into it. Now, what's the reason for that? I'm not 100 % certain. Well, I mean, obviously, it's something which I did wrong and something that we as a coaching group didn't get right.

24:20That's very clear. I'm not trying to move away from that. but it's not easy for me to be 100 % certain what exactly it was other than I think maybe towards the end we'd had that 20 game we had 20 qualifiers without defeat we had 10 straight wins we'd have one or two quite good wins in friendlies in places like Brazil and Germany and I think we maybe towards the Beat France, didn't we? Beat France. I think we got to the stage, or at least I did, where we thought the way to get the performances from the player was to remind him how good they are. We're good enough to do this and everything we need to win the games here in the room.

25:05I think probably if I had my time again, I'd be a little bit more critical of some of the players and some of the performances and not quite as kind in terms of trying to cajole them and convince them that you can do this, you're good enough. I think now, especially after the experiences of the years since then, I would be much more inclined to be critical of performances. But again, I'm trying hard to find reasons why we failed. There could be loads of others, you know. but I don't look back on the time as being a failure from start to finish. What I look back on it as is when you're the England coach and you get two tournaments and in both tournaments you don't do anywhere near as well as you should do, then unfortunately that's a failure.

26:02I think in Brazil it was quite clear that the squad weren't quite there and we were coming out of one team into another, but in 16, I don't think I've played a lot of games during my career and I only coached a few with Valencia. But I don't think I've ever thought much about a game as I have about Iceland since then. You were in the stadium that night, I was in that stadium. I thought, what happened? I've even spoke to a couple of the players and they can't describe what happened that night. We went in front and everything was... We started really well. You must think about that game, you must think about the experience of it.

26:38What do you feel about that? Yeah, I think that it was too easy in that game to get caught up in that some things are not meant to be. That's a danger. It seemed to me in that game we drifted to that defeat and I'd like to have thought we could have done something more, I could have done something more to have stopped that drift. But I don't know quite frankly what it would have been. We didn't have the bench that necessarily would have stopped that drift per se. And they were a difficult team to play against. It's like sometimes when you're with a Premiership team and you're playing in the FA Cup against a team from lower Division 1 or Division 2 and you think, well, our players are so much better than their players and we've got to win this.

27:29and then you get out there and you just can't get going and your players can't establish that we're better. And that I think was the case on that day. So I've got to say that what I've learned to do is to try and let things go because there is no point in allowing, in a career which has not really had that many failures, allowing a failure at one stage to suddenly derail everything that you believe in and think you can still do. that would have been a pity had I allowed that to happen. And the only way I could stop that happening was to let it go. And in terms of sort of beyond the England job and just where you're at today, did you ever see a time where you won't be coaching on the grass?

28:16Yes, of course I did. I mean, apart from anything else, you know, one, my body might tell me that, my brain or my mind might tell me that, my energy levels might tell me that, my lack of intensity, if it happens at any stage, will tell me that. Those days in Harbstad where I did literally everything to now having great assistants around me and helping me in so many ways, I don't think I could do the one-man band job that I perhaps did for the first 12-20 years of my career but then no one's asking me to as it were either they wouldn't expect me to do it and in fact it really would have been unkind to me in those 20 years to take as much of the work as i did and be so greedy and not sharing it around and you know when people ask you are you going to miss it well of course you know i don't know anybody who's got a job that they really loved and really believed in and their job has been their passion you know let's take a landscape gardener whose whole life has been landscape gardening and he's loved landscape gardening you know for someone like that when he leaves gardening behind and so said do you miss it of course he's going to say yeah i miss it because it was my life it was it was my passion is what i wanted to do um but it's a question of well how do you miss it you know do you do you miss it to the extent that you can't find anything else to do with your life.

29:46And that would disappoint me if I thought that I was so much a football person, that the only thing that defined me in life is that, you know, this man was in football, this man coached a few football teams, this man won a few games as a football manager, and that's him. That would disappoint me, because I think there's a lot of aspects to my life and my character and my intellect which should make me rise above that. When you finally do stop coaching, Roy, maybe you can do some landscape gardening. It's been great to speak to you. It's a bit difficult in the flat where we live.