“When he came, we were in trouble and things appeared dark. He didn’t panic. He was calm and he made us calm. Disaster was averted at the most important time. He saved us.”
The way things are going, that is what Steve Parish, the chairman of Crystal Palace, may be saying about Roy Hodgson at the end of the season. In fact they were the words Hodgson heard in the summer of 1997, when he ended a two-year stay at Internazionale. The Italian club’s owner, Massimo Moratti, was summarising the Englishman’s effect on a perennially dysfunctional club which had gone through seven head coaches in the five years before his arrival and would go through seven more in the five years after he left.
Related: Roy Hodgson wields the Croydon Way to halt Manchester City juggernaut | Jonathan Wilson
Continue reading...