Germany wanted Hodgson

Roy Hodgson has admitted that Germany wanted him to be their national coach.

The England boss was at Blackburn Rovers at the time, in September 1998, when German FA president Egidius Braun made an approach to Hodgson to replace Berti Vogts.

“When I was at Blackburn, the German national team contacted me with a view of my becoming their manager,” he said. “But Franz Beckenbauer, who had a huge influence in the German game, to his great credit, put a block on me, saying it would be a terrible admission of incompetence if it weren’t possible to find a coach who was German.”

Hodgson made the admission in the latest issue of football quarterly The Blizzard, and in a wide-ranging interview, he spoke of his work in Sweden in the 1970s, when he helped the nation establish a style of play. Sweden, of course, are England’s opponents in Friday’s Group D clash in Kiev. Hodgson even had a dig at one of his predecessors in the England job, Sven-Goran Eriksson, for taking credit for the work that Hodgson had done.

“What Bobby Houghton [at Malmo] and myself introduced to Sweden was not so much ‘English football’, the long ball game and so on, than a different style of defending.”

Hodgson continued. “Instead of playing with a team that was very spread out from one end of the field to the other, with a libero who stays in his penalty area and a centre-forward who never tracks back, we set up a system of zonal defence, a back four, people pushing up and, of course, getting the ball forward into the final area much more quickly.

“Interestingly, in my first year in Halmstad, we not only won the league, but scored 57 goals in 26 games. I don’t think that has been achieved since. And the Swedes didn’t like the idea that their game was dominated by two English guys. Bobby had won it in 1974 and 1975, I won it in 1976, he won it in 1977 and I won it in 1979!

Hodgson went on to speak of his pride of his financial caution as a club coach. “The only year Inter made a profit since Massimo Moratti took over was my second season there. I’m proud of that,” he added.