Roy still Manager!

TALL.

Nobody gets a second chance!!!

Hodgson's been getting second chances for 35 years and has achieved nothing since about 1982. Furthermore, he has failed to adapt his philosophy one iota.

I posted on these boards before the tournament that we wouldn't get caught on the counter and I was right as we defended far too deep. This meant that we couldn't build up front and so we went out. If Roy doesn't change this we are going to have more disappointing games.

Looking at it from the outside I think with some time Roy could well turn England into an effective international side.

You've already seen how quickly the players adapted to the defensive side of his game plan, not surprising as they're English players who've played in similar systems for several years.

With time Roy can work on the balance between attack and defense, he was never going to achieve thatbalance in the short period he had with the squad.

International football is about being hard to beat and getting results to qualify for a tournament, maybe not for the few top sides but for the majority of teams this is the case, England simply don't have the players or mentality currently to play the possession game, maybe in time they will but roys got to do the best with what he's got and making you solid and organized will qualify you for the wc, how you get on in the tournament is a different story.

4-4-2 isn't the problem. That's just a formation.

It's the tactics that are the problem. And Roy never strays from 2 banks of 4 parked deep combined with hoofball.

That's what he asks the players to do.

He's a relic

"With time Roy can work on the balance between attack and defense, he was never going to achieve thatbalance in the short period he had with the squad."


Read Redconn's post just after yours - a balanced side that attacks properly isn't going to happen under Hodgson.

Honestly, before the tournament, I was convinced that once Hodgson ceded possession needlessly against poor teams and set his team up to be utterly hopeless against any decent team England might come up against, I genuinely thought that the tide would turn against him and that if not the media, then certainly the fans would want shot of him.

This hasn't happened, though. The media have toed the line that there was nothing more that could be done with the players available, and in general the fans seem to have swallowed it. Then comes the amusing idea that Hodgson is going to integrate players like Wilshere and Cleverley and England will be a modern, free-flowing team.

This categorically will not happen under Hodgson. Don't let me tell you; let Roy tell you. Hodgson took the Swedish league by storm decades ago with a keep-it-tight-at-the-back-and-launch-it-forward approach, and by his own admission hasn't changed, nor will he.

When it started going tîts up at Liverpool, one journalist broke ranks and asked Hodgson if his approach needed to be revised to a more expansive game, considering the higher calibre of player at Liverpool and the need to win matches frequently. He was sharply slapped down by Hodgson, who said that his methods had worked for decades at clubs like Malmo and Neuchatel Xamax, so they should work at Liverpool.

Heck, he even said after the Italy game that possession stats don't bother him, and that the important stats to him are those showing how many times the opposition get behind the defence! Yet still the press and fans, by and large, speak as if all that's needed is more technical players and Roy will be attacking in no time. Really, you only have to watch his teams or listen to him speak about his philosophy and you'll see the folly of such a view.

Since seeing him being absolved of any real blame for the turgid displays at the Euros, I've wondered at length what exactly it is about Roy that sees him come out without any reputational damage from fiascos like Liverpool and the Euros. At Liverpool, I just thought the press were reluctant to blame an English manager, but they've caned English managers for failing with the national team, so it can't just be that.

The best hypothesis that I can put forward for why they view Roy as a better manager than he is is that he has worked abroad a lot, and thus is viewed as more tactically shrewd than he really is. I fully believe that if Sam Allardyce brought England to the Euros and played Hodgson's two-banks-of-four nonsense, he would be correctly derided as the out-of-his-depth managerial caveman that he is.

However, when Hodgson - who journalists generally view as a cultured, tactically savvy manager - played in that fashion, the press thought that there must be a reason for it, hence they've come up with this idea that the English talent pool has somehow been decimated over the course of two years (hence Capello being pilloried for under-achieving and being negative at the WC, whilst Hodgson is absolved of blame for tge Euros farce).

I also think Hodgson is very adept at lowering expectations. Either way, I struggle to think of a single case in football where such an obvious thing as Hodgson's negativity is continuously overlooked by so many people, despite plentiful evidence in matches and, indeed, from the horse's mouth. Hodgson is a chatty manager, and I've seen him plenty of times outline various elements of his philosophy which point to him being an unashamedly negative manager, but still there is this prevailing view that he's some sort of unheralded tactical mastermind.

After seeing the press practically disregard his comments after England's exit, it's getting to the stage where I think that if Hodgson went into the press room, wrote "I will never deviate from the two-banks-of-four long ball game, even if I'm given Barcelona's squad to work with" on a large plank of wood, and proceeded to beat seven shades of it out of every journalist in the room, they'd file reports about how Roy is ready to put the Euro disappointment behind him and take England into a new, modern era of progressive football.

Dr Seven Grater, that was probably the best analysis of Roy Hodgson that I've seen.

After Woyball, of course, redconn.

GRATER.

Nail. On. Head.

4-4-2 is the english way, better for the english to play the english way than the spanish way