Celebrating Roy Hodgson, the Premier League’s quiet revolutionary

From the moment Patrick van Aanholt runs into trouble near the left touchline, there’s a vaguely foreboding sense that this might just end badly. As van Aanholt turns on his heel and hurriedly lays the ball back to Mamadou Sakho, Liverpool’s remorseless front six scent blood. Mo Salah leads the hunt. Roberto Firmino tags in. A tentative pass into central midfield is the trigger for Naby Keita to join the press. Then Sadio Mane. Then Jordan Henderson and Andy Robertson. In the blink of an eye, Crystal Palace are being overrun, swamped by waves of red, the sharks circling, the Anfield crowd howling.

This is a story that normally has only one ending, and it’s not with Andros Townsend thumping the ball home in front of a stunned Kop to put Crystal Palace 1-0 up after a brilliant, devastating counter-attack. But that’s exactly what happened at Anfield in January: a sweeping 10-pass move, featuring almost the entire Palace team, with James McArthur and James Tomkins both executing Cruyff turns. It’s one of the great forgotten Premier League goals: lost in the dizzying drama of the finish, in which Liverpool won 4-3, it didn’t even make the shortlist for Goal of the Month. Like much of what takes place over the course of a 380-game season, it simply was, and then to all intents and purposes, it wasn’t.

Part of the reason for this, I think, is that it didn’t really fit into any established pattern of behaviour. Nobody watches football ‘clean’: what we see is conditioned by what we’ve seen before, what we want to see, and what we’ve come to expect. And without wishing to descend into a tiresome reductio ad guardiolum, in which no discussion of English football is complete until someone has mentioned Pep Guardiola, it’s fair to say that if his Manchester City side had scored that goal, the internet would have gone positively pink with delight. The Match of the Day pundits would have been moistening themselves on air.

But this was Crystal Palace, and more specifically Roy Hodgson’s Crystal Palace, and everyone knows what to expect from them. It’s two years this week since Hodgson arrived at Selhurst Park, the boyhood Palace fan who used to watch from the Holmesdale Road terraces as a kid, and now, in his eighth decade, was finally sitting in the dugout. Even now, as Hodgson’s side sit fourth in the table, with a squad of offcuts and journeymen assembled on a relative shoestring, there’s a sense that one of the Premier League’s genuine feel-good stories is hiding in plain sight.

Except at some point, we made the collective decision that Hodgson wasn’t allowed to be a feel-good story. After all, he failed with Liverpool, and he failed with England, and of course any manager who has ever failed must forever be deemed a failure. Quite apart from which, there’s never been a less fashionable time to be a septuagenarian English manager playing organised, conservative football. In a game obsessed with novelty and innovation, new faces and new frontiers, Hodgson offers the very opposite: the known known, the flat back four, a gnarled and grizzled familiarity.

This isn’t the start of some tedious debate about “credit”, that utterly indefinable and thus infinitely arguable concept which appears to have become football’s latest buzzword. Nor is this a parochial plea on behalf on the poor, endangered British manager. Besides, Hodgson always deserved better than to be lumped in with that sort of company anyway: your Hugheses and Pardews and Pulises and Allardyces. From Halmstad to the Hawthorns, Hodgson’s CV always emanated a sort of exotic mystery that few of his contemporaries could match: a taste for adventure, an allergic dislike of comfort, a refusal to conform to type.

The irony is that while Hodgson’s urbane cosmopolitanism was held against him when he first arrived in English football, the wheel has come full circle. Hodgson is one of the dinosaurs now, a product not just of his age and nationality, the sort of football his sides play or the sort of clubs he manages, but of tone. In an era where managers fancy themselves as televangelists, real-life Instagram influencers who aren’t just picking a team but selling a lifestyle, Hodgson stands alone: the cussed realist, the weatherman who simply tells you that it’s going to rain tomorrow, rather than trying to get you to buy into his exciting precipitation vision.

At a charity event this week, Hodgson was asked by the moderator whether he thought Palace could break out of its bottom-half purgatory and challenge the bigger clubs. For the modern managervangelist, this sort of thing is an easy win: a chance to talk about dreams and desire and never putting a ceiling on your ambition. Instead, Hodgson told the truth. “If I’m realistic, I’m not certain we can,” he replied. “Staying in the Premier League is always going to be the be-all and end-all for us: a bit of suffering. There's not going to be rainbows and blue skies and rose-coloured spectacles. There’s going to be plenty of fighting and heartache along the way.”

This, above all, is probably what’s going to get Hodgson the sack at some point. But for now, things are modestly looking up. Two years after taking over a club bottom of the table, Hodgson has finished 11th and 12th, beaten five of the Big Six, won at the Etihad, the Emirates and Old Trafford, given Liverpool the scare of their lives. With the caveat that calendar-year tables are silly and meaningless and Definitely Not A Thing, Palace nonetheless sit third in a theoretical 2019 version, ahead of Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and Tottenham, their opponents on Saturday.

Meanwhile, despite losing Aaron Wan-Bissaka in the summer, spending just £6 million on reinforcements and barely possessing a striker worthy of the name, Palace are still capable of springing a surprise. It was Hodgson who was instrumental in recasting Townsend and Wilfried Zaha as a slaloming front two, a move that has seen Zaha score more goals in this last two seasons than in the previous six combined. Vicente Guaita in goal has become an increasingly important springboard. Their centre-halves may not overlap like Sheffield United’s - indeed, you suspect that such a tactic would literally kill Gary Cahill - but they turn up, hold the line, win their headers and do their jobs.

Reputations stick in this business. There comes a point in any career where the legacy is no longer open to renegotiation, when opinions can no longer be contested, only reinforced. This is doubly true when you’re 72-years-old, your biggest jobs have been and gone, and everyone remembers that GIF of you looking sad at the 2014 World Cup. But Hodgson has spent a lifetime challenging conventions: that English managers never go abroad, that old-timers can’t relate to the new generation, that modern players get turned off by relentless drills on defensive spacing, that it’s impossible to be simultaneously Saul Bellow’s biggest fan and Martin Kelly’s, that defenders need to think like midfielders, that nobody ever recovers from messing up the England job, that romantic homecomings are inevitably doomed to failure. But then, that’s the thing about innovation. If you spend long enough at it, it begins to look an awful lot like stasis.