Roy Hodgson has described managing Liverpool as ‘a real honour’ but admitted that he didn’t come to Anfield at the most ideal time, revealing that he was told by two prominent figures at the club that he ‘might not find it quite so easy’ during a period of significant upheaval.
The current Crystal Palace boss was handed the reins on Merseyside in 2010, replacing Rafael Benitez off the back of taking Fulham to the Europa League final that year, but he lasted just six months with the Reds.
Speaking to Laura Woods in a feature for TNT Sports, the 76-year-old said: “Liverpool’s a fantastic football club. It’s a real honour to be invited to be the manager of Liverpool.
“I didn’t probably get invited to be manager of the club at the best possible time. It came after the success with Fulham so I suppose that’s why they went for me, but it wasn’t a situation where the club was as stable as it now is because of the ownership change.
“To be fair to Martin Broughton, who was handling the takeover with Christian Purslow, they did both make it clear – ‘we’re in charge and we’re making the appointment now but there’s a new group coming in, you might not find it quite so easy’.
“Of course, the problem was that we started badly, we didn’t win enough games and as a result we were down in mid-table and unfortunately you don’t survive that especially when Kenny [Dalglish] was in the wings ready to take over.”
While results were largely dismal under Hodgson during the first half of the 2010/11 campaign, it should be acknowledged that he came to Liverpool during one of the most precarious periods of their history.
It was a time when the real threat of administration was hanging over the club amid the dying embers of the calamitous ownership of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, amid a situation so dire that even Jurgen Klopp would’ve struggled to make the best of it.
The now-Palace boss wasn’t the right fit for LFC in that moment, and the situation into which he walked certainly wasn’t ideal for him. Thankfully, it’s an era from which the Reds recovered massively to become one of the foremost teams in England and Europe a few years later.
You can view Hodgson’s comments below (from 14:56), via TNT Sports on YouTube: