Almost half a century has passed since Roy Hodgson was first appointed as caretaker manager at Bristol City, and this week saw his return to Ashton Gate to assist save their season.
You may be sitting there, saying to yourself, had he not retired? Yes, well, not anymore. Hodgson, now 78, appears to be one in every of those men who doesn’t know what to do with himself in retirement.
He stepped away from football after leaving Crystal Palace in June 2021, only to return as Watford manager in January 2022. He left Watford five months later and announced he wouldn’t be returning to the Premier League, only to take the Palace job again in March 2023, where he stayed for nearly a 12 months before being forced to step down as a result of health issues.
Now, armed with a brand new fitness regime, one in every of English football’s favourite uncles is back within the dugout again aged 78. He must prefer to keep busy.
Clubs calling on really quite old men to return out of retirement seems like a little bit of a trend.
Martin O’Neill hadn’t managed a team since Nottingham Forest in 2019 when he went back to Celtic last October. He did an excellent job stabilising the team before he was replaced and put back into retirement, only then to be asked to return back out of retirement again to avoid wasting them again.
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Harry Redknapp was just about everyone’s favourite pick to halt Spurs’ slide towards relegation before the prospect of his return was ruined by Roberto de Zerbi, while Neil Warnock is caretaker manager at Torquay United 33 years after his first stint in charge.
One thing they convey is certainty – you realize exactly what you’ll get with Hodgson or Warnock just because there may be a 50-year back catalogue of labor to point to.
In an era where many clubs appear to be having one type of identity crisis or one other, bringing in a well-known face can have a chilled effect.
It may possibly be tempting to show your nose up at these ‘dinosaurs’ who’ve potentially been left behind by modern coaching, especially as a result of the recent trend of appointing ‘coaches’ over ‘managers’, whose job it’s to focus only on the pitch. Think Fabian Huerzler at Brighton or Keith Andrews at Brentford – each young, up and coming coaches who’re cogs in well-oiled machines.
But the amount and quality of backroom staff nowadays signifies that when things begin to go flawed, all anyone wants is a manager who could make us feel something, and these old guys are masters at that.
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