Hodgson ready for role of a lifetime

He leads his Liverpool team out for the first time on Sunday afternoon, to face Arsenal at Anfield. Hodgson became a fully qualified coach when he was younger than Wayne Rooney is now. This is his vocation.

The circumstances might not be the most felicitous - certainly in terms of the club's ownership - but Hodgson has been entrusted with one of the nation's great clubs. Fittingly, it was the Liverpool sides of the Seventies that provoked Hodgson to think about the game. So in that sense, at least, this is an intellectual homecoming. The challenge is creating new glories to reflect the old.

Why has Hodgson been selected to do this? What makes him special? Here was his answer ahead of Sunday's game: "I work as I have for a long time and I bring experience to the job. There's nothing special. There's a way I do my job. I realise I'm working with individuals but we need to be a team. The fans are coming, not to see me, but the team I prepare."

Yet for all his deliberate obfuscation, Hodgson is unusual. He went to John Ruskin Grammar School in Croydon and, like many grammar school boys of his generation, he is almost impatiently ambitious, with a healthy disrespect for imposed convention.

When interviewed he resists any attempts to pigeon-hole him. This is a man who is equally comfortable amid the platitudes of the press conference and the novels of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow.

Coaching is not something Hodgson did as an afterthought to a football career. He was a qualified coach by the age of 23 and for the four decades that followed he has been dedicated to his craft.

It started with the coaching guru Allen Wade, who as technical director of the Football Association between 1963 and 83, taught Don Howe, Bobby Robson, Dave Sexton and Dario Gradi how to coach. An ambitious young coach called Bobby Houghton had been one of the star pupils on Wade's coaching course and was made player-manager of Maidstone United in his mid-twenties. He appointed fellow Wade student Hodgson to be his player-coach. It was the inception of an influential relationship.

The pair evangelised Wade's methods and they remain the foundation for the way Hodgson continues to go about what he calls his "job of work". Wade's idea was to treat football teams as an organic whole. The team's 'shape' took precedence over the individual. All coaching should replicate match situations rather than simply repeat drills that had little relevance to what happened on the pitch. To the critics it turned players into robots; to its champions it took the game to a higher level.

After Maidstone, Hodgson had a short spell as a PE teacher at Alleyn's School in Dulwich in London, playing non-league football as he sought to become a full-time coach. His opportunity came when he was 29, appointed the manager of Swedish club Halmstads on Houghton's recommendation.

Houghton had taken over at Malmo in 1974 and won the title in his first two seasons. In his first season with Halmstads, who had struggled to avoid relegation the previous campaign, Hodgson won the league. "On the first day of the season, 20 newspapers said Halmstads would go down," Hodgson said. "It was a water-into-wine job."

Houghton and Hodgson revolutionised Swedish football. "They came over as young men with strong ideas and were immediately very successful," remembers Sven Goran-Eriksson. "At that time Swedish football was using the German model: 3-5-2 with a libero. They came in and changed the system.

"Suddenly they were playing very aggressive attacking football in a 4-4-2. They introduced zonal marking in place of man-to-man marking, and played a high line of defence. I was very influenced by this 'English style' and when I took over at Gothenburg in 1979 I also played my team this way.

"The Swedish FA criticised us heavily. They wanted everyone to play the same way as the national team, with a libero. But we were the three most successful coaches in Swedish football. The influence of Hodgson on our game was very important. Absolutely."

Hodgson won two league titles with Halmstads ('76 and '79) and, after an unsuccessful stint working with Houghton at Bristol City, won a further two league titles with Malmo ('86 and '88). "They introduced a whole new way of playing football," said former Sweden coach Lars Lagerback.

Hodgson has coached 13 clubs in six countries but, while he is conscious of importing fresh ideas, his approach to training is still founded on those principles he picked up from Wade and developed in Sweden.

So what are they?

In a lecture he gave to a coaching seminar in Portugal in 1994, Hodgson said the best way to coach players was through a process of "positive brainwashing" (no wonder the Swedish FA thought his approach was 'dehumanising'). It's about repetition, repetition, repetition.

"Strangely, football is a sport in which some don't expect to rehearse or practise," Hodgson said. "It's baffling. If you play tennis you will go out and spend hours and hours just working on your serve. If you are a golfer you will go out and spend hours working on one particular shot with one particular club.

"You have to bring that culture to football. There's no point in doing something for 10 minutes and then just have a game of five-a-side. The important thing is that what you are coaching the players to do has direct relevance to what will happen in a match situation."

Very little is done theoretically: Hodgson does not use diagrams, he would rather show the players on the pitch than on paper.

Everything is about the player's relation to his team-mates. "We work on it every day," said Fulham's Simon Davies towards the end of last season. "Every day in training is geared towards team shape."

Hodgson has built the larger cohesion of the team around partnerships within it. He will do the same at Liverpool, and in doing so will make the most obvious departure from the Rafael Benitez regime: compulsive rotation will be out. His methods require as much continuity between one team-sheet and another.

"I am sure Roy will be a success at Liverpool," Eriksson said. "He is a great organiser of teams but he is also a good man-manager. He knows how to encourage players. He is very positive."

At Fulham he had players hungry to prove themselves. Hodgson's rigorous approach can, especially to the mind of the modern footballer, be tedious yet even the sceptics in the Fulham squad became enthusiastic converts. Hodgson asks his players to take their job as seriously as he takes his. And, of course, nothing motivates more than success.

This story has been reproduced from today's media. It does not necessarily represent the position of Liverpool Football Club.