Roy’s the clown in this circus
He’d been speaking about how bleak things had looked for his Wolves side after a series of setbacks in the relegation dogfight over the Christmas period — Fulham and West Ham winning, Birmingham burgling a point against Manchester United and, worst of all, his own team going down to fellow strugglers Wigan.
“And then we go and win at Anfield,” he said, in a blissfully happy, slightly bemused, ‘who’d-a-thunk-it?’ kind of way.
The harsh truth, of course — and McCarthy probably knows this full well — is that a basement side winning on the hallowed turf of Liverpool FC was by no means unthinkable before Wednesday saw former Bohs’ man Stephen Ward turn Anfield’s woes into what can only be described now as a full-blown crisis.
And, as much as it was a pleasure to see a decent man like Mick McCarthy enjoy a rare moment of triumph in the Premiership this season, it was plain excruciating to see Roy Hodgson obliged to once more come out at the end of a game and attempt to defend the indefensible.
Few stories in English football in 2010 illustrate the hero-to-zero trajectory quite like that of Hodgson who, it ought not to be forgotten, actually ends a rollercoaster 12 months with a ‘Manager Of The Year’ gong in his back pocket.
Of course, that was for his part in Fulham’s unlikely scaling of the European mountain last season, a classic case of the small guys punching above their weight and a stirring romance which burnished Hodgson’s reputation as a manager of special powers.
Now, he stands cruelly exposed as someone who has been lifted right out of his comfort zone, a safe pair of hands ill-advisedly deployed to do the job of a miracle worker, a big fish from a small pool made to look like a minnow in the biggest ‘Pool of all.
While, it ought not to be forgotten that the decline at Liverpool was well established before he replaced Rafael Benitez — with the club’s on-field problems only papered over by the appearance of a return to normality in the boardroom — Hodgson has not only failed to steady the ship but has presided over the sprouting of a host of alarming new leaks.
He might have inherited a poor quality side by the club’s highest historical standards but his own signings — the likes of Joe Cole, Christian Poulsen and Paul Konchesky — have singularly failed to raise the talent threshold. And neither tactically nor in terms of man management is there any evidence that he is ever likely to get the best out of his key players, Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard.
It’s never easy for a manager to be captured by the cameras when his job of work is collapsing all around him but, even so, Hodgson has done himself few favours on the PR front, whether it’s by bemoaning the absence of the Anfield roar as if that was some unfathomable mystery, pointlessly spelling out the distinction between hope and expectation or, wordlessly but hysterically, appearing to try to rub his own face out of the picture in the dug-out.
OF course, better men than Roy have found the pressure at Anfield simply too much to bear — not least a certain Kenny Dalglish who, for all his success at the club, stepped down two days after a 4-4 cup draw with Everton, pleading that his “head was going to explode”.
His is the name the Kop sing now, when they’re now lamenting the loss of Rafa, while they probably go to bed dreaming of a high-scoring draw with their Merseyside rivals.
But then they must wake up to the continuing nightmare of a great club which, it suddenly seems not beyond the bounds of possibility, could end up ‘doing a Leeds’ if radical surgery is not applied.
There are no easy answers to the problems at Anfield — though Martin O’ Neill’s take would be interesting while Big Sam probably thinks he already has ‘em already — but what’s painfully clear by now is that Roy Hodgson has no kind of answer at all to the clubs rapidly growing tribulations.
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