Like an irascible Yoda, Roy Hodgson is back where he belongs: in the dugout

Bristol City parted with their manager, Gerhard Struber, last week, and replaced him with 78-year-old Roy Hodgson, a man they sacked 44 years ago. I know that moment when you’ve had a breakup: you feel a bit lost, and so you start calling your exes.

Roy’s been darkly realistic about his appointment. When an enthusiastic reporter asked if he’d consider a long-term role at the club, Roy shut down the idea with a blunt: “No, I’m too old.” Having already startled the younger man with this matter-of-fact acknowledgment of mortality, Roy went on: “I’ve got no intention of dying on the bench.”

Considering that Roy’s last job, at Crystal Palace, ended with him being rushed to hospital after he was taken ill during training, this was a fiercely honest response, but then honesty has long been a feature of Roy’s interviews. Mention his name to a football fan and they’re likely to bring up a post-match chat he did in 2011, when managing my favourite club, West Bromwich Albion. He felt the reporter was being “tricky” with his questions, and started swearing and suggesting they should abandon the interview. It was brilliant. I felt that same excitement you feel at school when you hear a teacher swear. I suspect Roy’s legendary temper, generating many impromptu cardiovascular workouts over the years, has made him the lively septuagenarian he is today.

But Roy is no barbarian. He famously loves novelists like John Updike and Philip Roth, and I’ve bumped into him at the English National Opera a couple of times. If you find that surprising, I’ve also been to a contemporary dance event with Arsenal legends Lee Dixon and Tony Adams. It gave me great pleasure, in the Sadler’s Wells theatre, to hear someone being addressed as Addo.

Hodgson is a thinker. I imagine him, on the training ground, sharing his timeless wisdom and experience with the Bristol City players, like Yoda instructing Luke Skywalker in the ways of the Force. Goodness knows if they’ll understand him. Once, after a defeat ended a West Brom 13-match unbeaten run – those were the days – Roy explained to a pack of football reporters that “even the tallest tree in the forest doesn’t grow all the way up to the sky”. The only part of that sentence the footie pack seemed at ease with was the word “sky”.

I love to see white hair in the dugout. There’s something desperately romantic about the wizened old pro – physically reduced by age but still burning with passion – employing younger bodies to enact his skilfully crafted plans. Roy’s like one of those old ballet masters you get in Degas paintings.

I hold such men in particular awe because, as someone who’s spent thousands of hours watching, playing, reading about and talking about football, I can honestly say that I still, to this day, understand almost nothing that’s happening on the pitch. If I’d given that amount of time to, let’s say, the mouth organ, I feel by now I’d be the go-to guy for that instrument. I watch TV pundits explaining why two central defenders should have been closer together or suggesting that ball watching, which to me sounds like a good thing, is actually a bad thing, and I have no idea what they’re talking about. As far as I’m concerned, they may as well abandon words altogether and just accompany their explanatory footage with whistling. Worse still, to my embarrassingly untrained eye, it seems that simulation – pretending to be fouled and/or injured – is now completely accepted as part of the modern player’s skill set, and any failure to utilise it is regarded as naive. I’m just out of my depth.

As someone who co-presented a long-running TV show about football and who was involved in an even longer-running football song, this total lack of insight is a source of considerable shame. Then again, one of England’s most famous players said to me he’d never met a football fan who understood the game. When I told him, as evidence to the contrary, that a man sitting behind me at a West Brom game had shouted: “They’re catching us on the first-phase pickup every time”, he dismissed it as affectation.

It’s possible, of course, to really love something while still being utterly baffled by it. Were it not for the fact that my wife reads this column, I’d offer up a pertinent example. I really love football, but probably not as much as Hodgson. It wasn’t right that he left the game in an ambulance. Now, hopefully, he’ll be leaving it to the sound of applause and singing. If anybody deserves one last dance with the great love of his life, it’s Roy Hodgson.

Photograph by Jasper Wax/Getty Images