Premature Rejection: The Press Against Roy Hodgson

It took the Football Association just two days from an announcement on its website to hold an interview and confirm Roy Hodgson as the new manager of the England national team. The press, however, needed no such time. The decision had already been made in newsrooms across the country: this was the wrong man.

Before Hodgson had even faced the cameras, he was a manager without a honeymoon period. The knives were drawn not over a ball being kicked, but over the simple fact that he was not Harry Redknapp. The man chosen by the FA is now set to reap the full force of their ire.

The Chief Cheerleader

Leading the charge has been Martin Samuel of The Daily Mail, who produced no fewer than three articles of escalating complaint within forty-eight hours. On Monday, he suggested Hodgson was the mediocre, approachable option compared to Redknapp, a man the FA hadn't even considered. With no apparent sense of irony, he wrote, “The pity for Hodgson is that, as at Liverpool, he may be rejected in the minds of many before the job has even begun.”

By Monday evening, Samuel was on the defensive in a piece titled, “Out to get them? No, we don’t hound managers, we just want results”. It was a barely coherent rant that demonstrated the opposite of its headline. He claimed “there is no collusion, no cabal, no convergence of interests,” while simultaneously floating bizarre theories that the FA used “unquantifiable justifications” to ensure Hodgson’s appointment. He insisted that support for Redknapp was “nuanced, not knee-jerk,” as the sound of knees jerking became almost audible. He then asked readers, “Do YOU know what football writers like most?” before answering his own question: “A winning team.”

The comments below the article suggested Samuel was out of step with the public mood. Of one hundred and nine responses, the overwhelming majority were coruscating. One reader asked, “How on earth you have the nerve to say that the press don’t hound out managers?” Another suggested Samuel was “clearly livid that their summer jolly around the table with ‘arry telling Bobby Moore stories… has just been cancelled.”

A Hostile Welcome

Once the appointment was official, Samuel was back on the attack, implying a “deafening silence on Twitter” meant footballers were “at least ambivalent about his appointment”. He claimed Hodgson would never have managed a collection of talent like the current England squad, “not even at Inter Milan,” and insisted there was “no point taking the England job without a sense of ambition.”

This was just a taste of what was to come.

At the confirmation press conference, one journalist decided it was the appropriate moment to try and embarrass Hodgson about his time playing in Apartheid-era South Africa during the 1970s. While such a career decision is hardly a moral high point, the timing and tone of the question felt less like genuine concern and more like pure vindictiveness. It was a deliberate curveball, thrown to trip him up before he had even started. Hodgson fielded it as well as could be expected, and the forty year old story is likely to be little more than a storm in a teacup.

The final insult, for now, came from The Sun. Its front page welcomed the new manager by mocking his speech impediment with its headline. The decision to run with this, of all possible angles, speaks volumes about the institutional attitude towards this appointment.

Moulding Opinion

The swivel-eyed blatherings of the last couple of days have reinforced the belief that many in the media are simply angry that their tame Premier League manager did not get the job. Redknapp, with his bluster and bravado, fitted the narrative they prefer for the national team. His presence loomed over the press conference, even though he was apparently never in the running.

The press has already written its script for Hodgson’s tenure, centred on the unanswerable question of what might have happened had Harry been in charge. England managers, of course, always fail in the end. But the media’s campaign seems less about reflecting public opinion, as they so often claim, and more about seeking to mould it. It is a lesson for all football supporters to remember this summer and beyond.