For fans such as myself last week’s removal of Tom Hicks and George Gillett was of huge importance. Football had almost taken a backseat compared to the future of Liverpool FC – under a huge debt mountain that would eventually have threatened it’s existence.
Despite all the off field court-room battles, nail-biting, and ultimately victory the reds remained in a perilous league state.
Rafa’s constant battles with the owners saw him lose his job in the summer, and the board scoured the world’s top managers – saw that none of them wanted to come to a penniless club – and took Roy Hodgson on. A nice man apparently, a man the media liked (as Broughton remarked at the time) who had just took Fulham all the way to defeat in the Europa League.
If Liverpool hadn’t been run in the summer by Tom Hicks and George Gillett, then quite simply Roy Hodgson would not be in charge at Anfield presently. Top managers do not arrive at clubs with sell to buy policy’s.
Some fans believed that last season’s 7th placed finish was a massive underachievement at the club – our suggestion was that maybe Benitez had overachieved for his previous 5 years. 17 months ago when Liverpool finished 2nd with 86 points, having lost only 2 games in that campaign – many of us looked at our squad and were amazed at our points haul.
The demolition of Real Madrid and Man Utd within a week didn’t quite fit with the quality of the players on the pitch.
Skip forward less than a year and a half and many of those players are still playing at Anfield.
Liverpool do indeed have many average players. Torres is indeed off form, or potentially worse – shocked by the lack of ambition at Anfield, and the aging Gerrard is unfortunately a shadow of his former self. In 2008/09 he contributed with over 20 goals for the club. Unfortunately for Gerrard – that looks unlikely to be a feat he will ever match again. However it is abundantly clear that Liverpool are much much better than a team that has won one game in 8. And even that one victory was by the skin of the teeth.
Roy has two major problems in the eyes of Liverpool fans.
1. Many fans didn’t want him in the first place. Certainly a glance over his CV, his Premiership record at Blackburn and Fulham, proves that he does not have the ability to compete in the Premier League.
2. Many fans also see him as the man Hicks and Gillett installed at Anfield. A man brought in to say Yes when Rafa would have said No. He does, effectively, remain tainted by the previous regime.
I’ll admit I didn’t want him in the summer. I’d read his CV and was underwhelmed. Even Fulham’s league campaign this season now seems to have improved without him. But like many fans I realised that there were bigger issues at the club. Now those issues have been resolved our focus once again is 100% on the pitch at Liverpool.
The football this season has been dire. Shockingly bad. Second half of the game against Arsenal aside – there has not been any acceptable football played under Hodgson.
The football is bland and defensive. However it is a strange form of defensive in the fact that we are leaking goals left right and centre. Liverpool, normally with the ability to control midfield at the very least, now look overrun and weak.
Liverpool need a manager the players can look up to and the fans unite behind. Roy Hodgson does not fit either of those categories.
Mid-season isn’t a great time to find great managers. Martin O’Neill is not a great manager. He is not a Liverpool manager.
The reds may indeed have to wait for next summer to decide upon their future direction.
Until then, Hodgson must be relieved of his job and someone with an association to better times at Anfield needs to be in.
I’ll admit I didn’t want Dalglish to take the job over permanently. I didn’t want his excellent record in our history to be stained by being appointed by Hicks and Gillett. However they have left. To restore unity and to have a manager who has been there and done it (with two different English clubs) in charge till the end of the season is now vital.
The £3M compensation Hodgson would receive will be a bitter financial blow, but it is equivalent to the amount that finishing 6 Premier League places higher confers.
It’s time for the Liverpool board to correct an awful decision in the summer and appoint Dalglish as first team manager until the end of the season.
after 10 games is now 20 games in the league, the “smaller step” is now a bigger one, because NESV endoresed him instead of keeping quiet, Purslow is still adirector, ..lots more to do, but if they dont give Kenny a job of unification and exclude hodgson & purslow then Henry & Werner may yet be from frying pan, to fire!! …
I totally agree to what have been written. I am a RED fan true & true, I have don’t remember the team playing so clueless and defensive ever in his history.
Liverpool have always played with spirit and gusto even when they are down. With RH as the manager, the team is totally spirit-less. He is just clueless on how play the top players in the team. Liverpool is just too big a club for RH to manage..
Lets hope this Thursday & Sunday, he gets it right.. if not its better for him to go.
Excuse me chaps, but you’re slagging off the man who won six Swedish championships with Halmstad and Malmo, and the Danish league and cup double with Copenhagen. Sheer class!
Roy by now must know his time at Lfc is up. He has lost the confidence of his players and the fans. I suggest he should do what is his best contribution to Lfc now and that is to continue on as a stop gap and ensures a smooth transition for the next big name manager hopefully will be appointed before Jan. transfer window and not to lose the remaining games of his remaining brief tenure. If the board keep delaying sacking him, our situation could be so bad no big names want to take the post.
I too had some concerns, but by and large thought Roy’s appointment was reasonable given the circumstances of the club at the time. The performances of the players (more than the results,even) and the statements made after the Everton game have changed that. It’s one thing to take the Fergie/Wenger approach of blaming everyone but your own players for a bad result – but to call a bad performance the best performance of the year?! Last drinks, Roy!
That said, many players need to wear blame too!
I was prepared to give RH the benefit of the doubt when he was appointed, but I think it’s clear now that he is out of his league, his post match analysis yesterday was shocking and clearly shows the level of his ambition and ability. I feel he may already have lost the dressing room, simply in terms of players belief in him. Further more with him at the helm, I fear we will not attract the quality of player we need. So I feel there is no option but to cut our loses and move on.
virtually every goal we’ve conceeded has come from our left hand side I think konchesky is truely awful.
as much as roy is a good man, i think he’s getting 2 many things wrong.everybody makes mistakes, but there are some that should never be made & roy’s making too many of them+majority of our players do not deserve to wear d jersey. my opinion:
1. bring in either hiddink , rijkaard, hitzfeld or dalglish
2. sell maxi, lucas, soto, aurelio, konchesky, skrtel, lucas, kuyt, babel, jovanovic, ngog
3. add 50m to d proceeds & buy contrao, shawcross, defour, moutinho, turan, mcgeady, aguero, van der wiel
Roy through no fault of his own is going to be the presses stick to continue beating LFC with. The papers are desperate for Liverpool to fail so they continue to find or invent reasons for this. It is time to get Kenny in. All this talk about him being out of touch is a load of cr-p, the guy is !000% better than RH and would put some of the passion back into the club that it needs. Ley RH make a clean break before the papers crucify him, he’s too decent a man to have to go through all that….
Agree with everything you said mate and i thought he would be sacked today.All day I was waiting to hear the news that he is gone.The quicker he goes the better or we will go down if he stays .Lots of ex lfc players wanted Rafa gone so we can get an english manager.It is a crime that somebody at our club decided that replacing Rafa with roy is a good thing for our club.J Henry bring Rafa back please.
all this is true ? but martin o neill has a good eye for buying decent players and can get the best from players houllier always thought he would be replaced by o neill ,he knows wat its like too be a winner !! its time now to get him and possible that (a young,r dunne, )could follow .
The new owners must act quickly.
They must find a suitable replacement capable, with a proven track record, of managing at the top level. Show the ruthlessness this club has desperately lacked recently and call time on Roy Hodgson’s tenure as Liverpool manager.
Pellegrini would be available without a compensation clause, which would offset having to pay Hodgson off.
Act decisively and swiftly. Give the new man time to evaluate who he needs in the January window
I think there is a real consensus amongst Liverpool fans- Roy has to go!
Good article! I totally agree with you. Roy has to go
Appointing Roy as LFC manager is as worse as selling the club to Hicks & Gillette!!
Roy is a nice guy, you can’t help but like him. However I don’t want to see him ripped to bits by the media, I don’t want to see him leave Liverpool a broken man. It was a mistake to offer him the job, and it was a mistake for him to take it. Leave now Roy before it ruins you, and possibly ruins Liverpool. You already look a different man than the man who walked into Liverpool just a few months ago, everything about you suggests you are out of your depth. Resign now, please.
Trouble is you’d need Benitez levels of genius to win a half of football with these players, let alone a game.
Kenny Dalglish hasn’t managed anyone for quite a while.
While I think it’s time for RH to go (I didnt want him in the first place either) I don’t think Kenny is the answer either. Is it only me that would rather spend 15million or so on getting the right manager rather than a couple more poulsons. We need a top rate manager before we think about players. Then let him built the team we need. Also get rid of Sammy Lee. I know he has been a good servant for the club but he doesn’t install any confidence in me at all.
Let me just clarify, I was merely highlighting that you don’t pick up the world’s best managers in mid-season, just like you don’t pick up great players in January.
Much better to bring Dalglish in now. He may do a fantastic job, we don’t know. But at least we will have a title winning manager at the helm for the rest of the campaign.
Then, when it approaches May we can look again and look to the future next season.
But why would Dalglish be any better than Roy. He hasn’t managed for a long time and we all saw Keegan’s record when he came back after three years out of management. Atleast Roy is acclimitised to Premiership football. Ideally I think we want Hiddinck. He has a track record of taking on tough challenges, and when at Chelsea he took them on temporarily while also managing at international level too. Or even maybe Trappatoni (however you spell his name).
Dalglish has been out of the premiership for about as long as Roy had been when he took over at Fulham. Kenny knows the club and the players and would be seen as a hugely positive move if he was brought in. Hodgson always felt wrong, but i was willing to be proven otherwise.
I agree totally…Roy was never the right man for Liverpool. Get rid of him now & start moving up the table.
Yes,
I will go along wwith most of that. RH does not have the competence to rally a team doing badly. His brain fumbles along geared to a game several divisions below the one he is laughingly managing. He simply cannot cut it at this level so it appears the answer is to get his team down to a level he feels comfortable with. On that he is astoundingly successful it would seem.
There is no future for LFC with this man and I assume alreasdy that NESV staff are astute enough to see exactly how the land lies. Their task is difficult enough without the ineptitude of Hodgson albatross-like around their neck.
He really must go and go now in these early days of reformation.
I agree, no point in wasting any more games really…. Roy’s time is up
Good article, isn’t it true that if Hodgson is pushed early he only gets one years salary? Apparently Broughton alluded to a clause in Roy’s contract specifying this.