Roy Hodgson: Big Mouth Strikes Again

IN a week when plenty of Liverpool supporters have been down on their manager Brendan Rodgers after their team’s pitiful capitulation against Hull City, Roy Hodgson has stepped in to offer a helping hand to the Northern Irishman by diverting fans’ ire away from their acting manager back on to the former incumbent of the Liverpool hotseat.

It seems as though every time Roy Hodgson dares to broach a subject of anything related to Liverpool Football Club his foot speedily races up to his mouth. As if his previous inane ramblings and underwhelming actions when he was in charge of the club hadn’t evoked enough disdain on Merseyside, the leader of the English national side has done it again in an interview about striker Daniel Sturridge.

The England manager has come out and publicly admitted that he played Sturridge for a full  90 minutes in a recent friendly match despite knowing that the forward wasn’t fully fit and therefore at risk of picking up an injury by playing. Said Roy:

“I suppose you could argue we did put his resolve to the test. I might have been guilty of that but I don’t apologise for it. I am delighted he did get out there, even though he maybe didn’t feel 100%, because that means in the future I will know I can trust him in an England team and he is not going to be playing when he feels like it – he is going to be playing when he’s fit.”

The fact that a national team manager would come out and publicly state that he would risk a player picking up an injury in a meaningless friendly as some sort of test of that player’s commitment is, frankly, little short of a joke. Any injury can have profound ramifications for players.

Missing games can lead to them losing their place for their club side. It can lead to further injuries, loss of form or a downturn in confidence. In Sturridge’s case, his exertions for England cost him his starting place in a crucial Merseyside derby. This is a player who has suffered multiple injuries throughout his career and who has been playing at less than 100% all season long. Apparently this matters little to Hodgson and Sturridge proving his commitment (or ‘resolve’ to use Roy’s own words) circumvents such facts.

Hodgson went on to mention in his interview that Sturridge has missed several England games while he has been manager of the national team presumably as some kind of justification for his doubts over the player’s commitment (sorry Roy, ‘resolve’). That is absurd. Sturridge missed pretty much all of Liverpool’s pre-season through injury (because of an injury sustained while playing for Hodgson in a post season friendly match). He was unable to take to the field for his country against Chile (just four days prior to playing against Germany) because he was injured. It’s not as if the striker’s Mother has been writing notes to get him out of P.E on a regular basis, he’s had genuine problems and has required periods of rest wherever possible to keep him playing football.

There is little doubt that Brendan Rodgers wouldn’t have played the striker as much as he has done had Luis Suarez not been banned at the beginning of the league campaign. Liverpool were desperate to get off to a good start and needed Sturridge. He stepped up, played despite not being fully fit and fired Liverpool up the table. That was a risk worth taking because the consequences would have been significant had Sturridge not played and won Liverpool so many points. The same cannot be said of a friendly match against Germany’s reserve team.

Hodgson also made the strange claim that Sturridge needed to play against the Germans because there is only one more international meet up before the World Cup begins and therefore presumably he needed Sturridge on the pitch or the player wouldn’t have been guaranteed to start/be in the world cup squad for England. Absolute rubbish. If Roy Hodgson honestly believes that playing injured for 90 minutes against a German reserve team was necessary for Sturridge to stake his claim for the England number 9 shirt this summer then he’s out of his mind.

Sturridge and Wayne Rooney are comfortably England’s best two strikers. Sturridge hasn’t stopped scoring since he joined Liverpool in January of this year and is one goal behind the Premier League’s top goalscorer Sergio Aguero. He’s not a 19 year old kid who has put a few good games together and earned his first international call up. Everyone knows how Sturridge plays and what he offers. If Hodgson wasn’t confident picking the top scoring English forward in the Premier League over the likes of Rickie Lambert, Danny Welbeck or Jermain Defoe then one has to question how the hell he became a manager in the first place. To suggest that without 90 minutes of pained toil against Germany that Sturridge’s England place would have been in jeopardy is absurd or simply disingenuous.

Of course, managers will always want their best players on the pitch and that’s probably why Hodgson made Sturridge play that inconsequential match. Friendly or not, he wanted to win against the Germans and Sturridge was the best forward he could have picked. Sturridge ambled through the game, clearly nowhere near his best and of course has subsequently had to miss out on starting the Merseyside derby for his club before picking up an injury in training a few days later.

The injury he suffered was to his ankle, not his thigh which he had been struggling with when England played Germany. The point here though is not that Roy Hodgson injured Daniel Sturridge, it’s that he risked injuring him for no good reason when he knew the potential consequences.

A manager in Hodgson’s position should not then be boasting in public about putting a player through some stone age test of ‘resolve’ that could have adversely affected his fitness and career, not to mention his club’s chances of success. Sturridge has a history of niggling injuries, hasn’t been fully fit all season and could have done with that 2 week rest. Instead Hodgson risked the striker’s fitness and then went on to tell the world about how unapologetic he was for gambling with the player, astonishingly stating that English players “are better [off] getting injured now,” rather than in the summer.

What kind of buffoon comes out and says such things? Would Roy have agreed with such a ridiculous statement when he was a club manager? Would he have made such a statement had Sturridge been playing for his good friend Alex Ferguson?

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this ridiculous public admission though. Hodgson’s greatest weakness is running his mouth and not knowing when to shut up. He says the wrong things at the wrong times. Then he says some more wrong things. Whether it’s hailing the worst Liverpool performance at Goodison Park in a decade as his team’s ‘best performance of the season’ or criticising Liverpool fans for marching against two parasites running their club into the dirt, Hodgson never ceases to amaze the people on Merseyside who grew to know and loathe him.

To the rest of the country, Liverpool supporters were harsh on Roy and didn’t give him a chance. The fact is that, taking the dour and unsuccessful brand of football that he had the Reds playing out of it for a second, Roy talked rubbish. He offended people and patronised them. His comments made no sense and only served to piss people off. Seemingly little has changed.

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