Roy Hodgson can silence doubters by offering Crystal Palace tactical clarity

John Dillon15 September 2017

The first qualities Roy Hodgson will bring to Crystal Palace are courtesy, calm and an engaging sense of gentlemanliness.

Then, as Tony Blair might have put it, will come organisation, organisation, organisation.

There is a lot be said for Hodgson’s educated and erudite manner in a game in which managers so regularly teeter on the edge of eruption and un-sportsmanlike behaviour.

But it is his ability to sort out football teams for which he has been employed.

The similarities with Sam Allardyce’s parachute job at Selhurst Park last season are striking, even if their characters are very different.

In Pictures: Sam Allardyce's managerial career

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Like Big Sam, Hodgson has turned up in south London having last worked as England boss, albeit after a four-year stretch which ended in ignominious defeat by Iceland at Euro 2016 - in contrast to Allardyce’s reign of one game.

Similarly, too, it will be with a work ethic and a style of football based on structure, discipline, long sessions of pattern-of-play and positional repetition on the training pitch by which Hodgson will attempt to haul Palace off the bottom of the Premier League table.

It is exactly what they need after the rapid failure of the Frank de Boer experiment if they are to survive and prolong their longest-ever stay in the top flight to six seasons.

Allardyce re-affirmed his reputation as a coach of meticulous practice and tactical, practical clarity at Palace.

The same opportunity now awaits Hodgson after the battering he took as England coach, starting at home against Southampton on Saturday.

The craft of men like this is football management by method, hard work, planning and experience, not by some mysterious form of alchemy.

Many have taken a snobbish delight in denigrating their style and their ways, yet neither man has ever been out of work for long. And here is Hodgson, required at the helm once again at the age of 70.

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For all those who groaned and mocked when Palace called him in to replace De Boer, here’s what Hodgson did in terms of saving West Bromwich Albion and Fulham from relegation during the past decade, when he had already turned 60.

Five months after he took over at Craven Cottage in December 2007, Hodgson kept Fulham in the Premier League.

Yes, it was a close run thing with a last-day escape. But they had been 18th and two points from safety when he took charge. Job done.

The following season, he secured Fulham’s highest ever Premier League finish of seventh - which led them into Europe and the realms of near-fantasy football in 2009-10.

That was the campaign in which Fulham finished 12th, only four points off ninth place - but which, naturally enough, was much more memorable for the club’s journey to the Europa League Final and a 4-1 defeat of Juventus along the way.

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They were beaten 2-1 by Atletico Madrid as the Final went to extra-time, but it was still an extraordinary story.

It earned Hodgson the LMA Manager of the Year award and the chance to take over at Liverpool later that summer.

That move was a failure as he lasted only seven months, but the club was up for sale at the time and riven by politics.

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The fact that he bounced back at another, smaller club – West Brom - suggests that he is well-suited to Palace.

At The Hawthorns, he took over in February 2011 with the team 17th. They finished 11th.

The following year they were 10th - their highest finish since 1981 - by which time Hodgson had already been appointed England boss.

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These statistics prove why Palace have acted shrewdly by calling him in now.

Hodgson’s time in charge of England has been scrutinised intensely. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil was a calamity. So were last year’s Euros. Those are unavoidable facts.

But this is a job that has demolished so many leading managers.

Managing the Three Lions, Hodgson seemed to drift away from the principles which had guided him.

The pressures of the job and the endless clamour which surrounds it often have that effect on those who take it on.

The fact that he was undone by an Iceland team playing a brand of football he had taught to the Nordic lands - and coached by a Swede who revered him, Lars Lagerback - was the ultimate irony.

It is a different kind of football twist which has landed Hodgson back at the “hometown” club where he was a youth team player decades ago.

Once again, England’s most widely travelled football manager is setting out to prove his homeland wrong.

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