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Decent read:
Roy Hodgson has just finished the Philip Roth novella Indignation, the title of which might describe the Premier League's favourite emotional state. Fulham's manager admits he can lose his rag with the best of them, but has 33 years of experience in club and international coaching to help him gauge reality.
He has literature, too, because Fabio Capello's potential successor as England coach scours bookshops for masterpieces the way he scans the game's talent markets. Sebastian Faulks visited Fulham's training ground recently, in search of insights for a character he was creating, but it was Hodgson who demanded all the tips.
He takes up the story: "Birdsong was one of the best books I'd ever read. When I was at Blackburn [in 1997-98], I talked about authors I liked and mentioned Sebastian. He must have seen it and sent me his new book through the post, Charlotte Gray, which he'd autographed.
"That was 10 or 11 years ago. Then one day I was told that he wanted to come down to Fulham and look over the training ground, because one of the characters in his next book was a footballer. I was delighted. He invited me to the book launch and in his speech said, 'I've seen Roy Hodgson here today, I'd like to thank him, but I went to Fulham to talk to him about football and he was more interested in talking to me about books.' It's true. I kept saying – 'What about this one, what about that one?'"
In football, you can always find another right-back, but Hodgson's fascination for literature is such that he has exhausted many of the "greats" and may need an army of book-reviewing scouts to keep his mind stretched, away from the training ground, where he is omni-present, and Capello-like in his imposition of principles.
"Indignation. Very, very good, it was," he is saying. "I thought I'd read them all. Isaac Bashevis Singer and [Saul] Bellow are two others. The problem I have now is that I'm always trying to find new authors, because ones like Updike and Roth and Bellow – you end up reading them all. Those people are hard to find. I found one recently: Sebastian Barry – The Secret Scripture and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty."
To take a conversation off the volcanic island of Premier League management these days you need to go to men of a certain vintage. Hodgson, a lover of words and an advocate of self-expression, agrees that something has been lost in English football's media-reflected (or generated?) guardedness. Here is an industry in terror of its own voice. But we are not alone, he says. "It must be pretty boring to be a journalist in Italy. It's getting pretty boring here, too, because we don't say anything, but compared to the Italians we're garrulous.
"I see Carlo [Ancelotti, the Chelsea manager]. He typifies all those years in Italian football. He's completely poker faced. He answers slowly. Sven [Goran Eriksson] was unbelievable. I'd watch him come on TV and be able to quote verbatim what he was going to say.
"You've got to admire the professionalism. But we've lost a little bit from the days of Brian Clough saying the goalkeeper's a clown. I'm not saying that was right, but to some extent we're breeding a bunch of eunuchs when it comes to interviews. You're so worried about what an honest reaction or a throwaway line can do to you."
Hodgson, an aficionado of good lines, turns to an old Swedish folk saying to illuminate Fulham's problem in emulating last season's best-ever league finish – seventh place, which followed the astonishing turnaround of the 2007-08 season, when the Cottagers won only two of their first 20 games but responded to the new manager's intense training-ground drills to take 12 points from their last five games and fall over the line in 17th place. The phrase Hodgson likes is: No tree grows to heaven.
"And it's worth bearing in mind. It stops you striving too hard for something you're not going to get. It keeps your feet more on the ground. Every season, out of 20 managers very few are going to come away with any plaudits.
"I'm worried about ceilings, and I'm worried about the constant desire for progression. I know you've got to progress but you can start reaching too high, and in doing that you can destroy a little bit of the tradition of the club, the structure.
"I constantly preach the message that all the time we can remain a Premier League club, filling the stadium with 25,000 people, playing the sort of football that those 25,000 people seem to appreciate, I've got to say I think that's success. We got into Europe. People will say 'Let's get into Europe every year'. The first thing then will be bigger salaries, asking the chairman to spend even more money, and losing a bit of what we've built up in the last two years.
"Who knows: maybe one or two of these big-hitters we'd brought in for £10-15m, and £50,0000 or £60,000 a week – money we don't pay – wouldn't be as dedicated to doing the job on the training field. Maybe it would be a different type of management. Maybe we'd be handing the club over to them. There might be people who have other ideas, who want us to be Chelsea, right up there."
From Sweden, to Switzerland, to Italy's Serie A, to Denmark, the United Arab Emirates to Finland and back to Fulham, Hodgson has been "right up there" on the scroll of elite peripatetic coaches. So it seems reasonable to ask whether he might like to take over from Capello should the martinet elect to go back to his paintings after the World Cup.
"I don't know I can say it's ever been an ambition as such, but it's always been a crowning glory to be asked to coach your own national team. I've coached foreign national teams, and I've been invited to coach other national teams abroad, but as an Englishman if anyone ever said 'We think you're the right man to lead the national team' you've got to be very pleased with that. I'm really happy that people have seen some qualities in me that make them say I'm a candidate."
As a product of the 1960s-70s English coaching school that produced Don Howe, Bobby Robson and Terry Venables as trailblazers, Hodgson recognises in Capello the same urge to control, to lay down boundaries and individual responsibilities on the pitch, that animates his own work.
"When I watched his teams play – I came across him at Milan and Roma – you always got the impression that it was a team that had a clear idea of what it should be doing," he says. "In that respect I can give him my wholehearted support, because that's how I believe the job should be done."
Fulham's rise from the swamp of relegation jeopardy to midweek Europa League trips to Rome is an advert for coaching and talent-spotting. Mark Schwarzer, the goalkeeper bought from Middlesbrough, has been exemplary, and Brede Hangeland, John Paintsil, Aaron Hughes and Paul Konchesky have formed a robust back four.
Recalling the time he took over from Lawrie Sanchez, and proceeded to ship out 17 players while bringing in 13, Hodgson says: "Mostly it's been the weight of the work we've done, the regularity, the consistency, the routine element, and trying very hard to remain on the even keel and not lose sight that what we're doing is right, irrespective of whether we're in a little losing spell. I couldn't deny that the pleasure I've had working here would compare with anything I've done."
Hodgson's own book – his memoirs – demands to be penned, and it will start at the Swedish club he likens to the predicament he inherited at Fulham. "Being here would compare mostly with my first job at Halmstads, a second division team I took and won titles with, and maybe the Swiss national team, who were really in the doldrums when I went there. We'd lost the public. For my first home friendly match against Bulgaria in Berne there were 3,000 people in a 30,000-seat stadium. So that told you what the Swiss public thought about their national team. To change that to parties in the street during the 1994 World Cup was a great feeling."
He coached the Inter of Roberto Carlos and Paul Ince from 1995-97 but left before the free-spending age brought the original Ronaldo and others to San Siro. "The Inter job taught me most. Before that the Neuchâtel job, which introduced me to a world of quasi-politics. At Inter the president took to me, and Giacinto Facchetti [the Inter legend and then director] became a close friend and mentor.
"He protected me. So often when things were at their worst, Facchetti would stand up and say, 'Listen, he's good, I like him, he's a good coach, leave him alone.' When Facchetti spoke, people listened, so I was really very lucky in that respect.
"I've only been sacked once in my life, technically, and that was at Blackburn. I took that very badly. My reaction was ludicrous, when I think back on it. I disappeared, refused to do any interviews etc etc. I wouldn't make that mistake again. But it did hit me very hard. I regarded it as a real blow to my professional pride. I'd rather walk away if I felt people didn't want me there, as I did at Inter."
Which brings us back to Fulham, the Premier League "ceiling" and Hodgson's willingness to stay at Craven Cottage. Would he like to? "Absolutely. There's no reason not to. The thing would be to make sure they want me to. If I could feel they really want to continue along these lines, and they want me to be the man to do it, I don't have itchy feet at all."
To the outsider a parting seems unthinkable, but then Hodgson has observed all the evolutionary lurches and upheavals of a continent. "We've been somewhat lucky, those of us who've seen the 70s, 80s and 90s," he says. "There was in the beginning more of a feeling that football was a tightly knit family, a village. If you were lucky enough to get into the village – not necessarily as the chieftain – you were a bona fide member.
"There was more closeness between the players. You would travel on coaches, there would be no TV, no iPods, they'd be talking and discussing. Now players don't stay together as long. They live in their own world. They treat it as a job rather than a whole mode of life. They think: 'When are we training, how long are we training for, when can I get away?' I've seen both worlds, and I say to myself: 'I enjoyed the last one – I enjoy this one, too'."
