Bye-Bye Hodgson

Well, it's official. After a horrible half season, the 2010 Manager of the Year is now the first fired manager of the new year (well other than that other Roy but the Championship doesn't count). It really is a shame it had to come to this. You had a quality mid-table manager just simply way too far out of his depth. Hodgson can get you some decent results, but he is never winning a title. Even at his best, he lacks an ability to get any team to perform on the road. But, I will stop. Far too much ink has been wasted on his ineffectiveness as the manager of Liverpool. He just was not the right man for the job.

I think his career won't be soiled too horribly by this, and he surely will work again. There will probably be a few more openings this year in both the Premier League and the Championship, and he has never shown himself to be unwilling to go abroad. So, he will work again. He will be successful again, but his success is not that of a championship winning manager, it is that of stable mid-table success. An odd cup run, midtable finishes and no relegation. And that's what plenty of teams would kill for.

Roy Keane, on the other hand, has to be close to finished in football management. He is quite far removed from his only success (Sunderland's promotion and their subsequent staying up) and has followed that with his acrimonious exit from Sunderland and his horror show with Ipswich. Simply put, I don't think he has the temperament for management. Unless he got a big club (very fat chance), he will almost assuredly never manage a player as good as he was. Regardless of where he coaches, he will never coach a guy as tough as he was. And he will forever remain infuriated by his players by not reaching his own lofty standard. They will burn out by the military atmosphere, and eventually tune him out. He was hated as a player, and that's fine. In this day and age, you simply cannot be hated as a coach. The players have too much power.