Hodgson's choice is not an option

Sports writer

Tuesday 9 October 2012

More than once, Roy Hodgson might have wondered if political cunning was the skill most demanded of the manager of England.

St George's Park, England's new training headquarters, is expected to help produce the stars of tomorrow. Picture: PA

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Richard Wilson

From a few misjudged words of his own during a journey on the Tube, to the flaws of morality and character that continue to undermine the careers of John Terry and Ashley Cole, Hodgson had to pick his way carefully through the past week. Selecting his squad for the World Cup qualifying games against San Marino and Poland must have felt like a welcome distraction.

There is little point in Hodgson bemoaning the complexity of the job. His predecessor, Fabio Capello, resigned during the aftermath of Terry being accused of racism during a clash with Anton Ferdinand, the QPR defender, while Sven-Goran Eriksson's time in charge was a succession of personal dramas played out in the tabloid press.Hodgson selected Terry for the European championships last summer and he intends to continue with Cole as his first-choice left-back, despite the defender being charged by the Football Association over his Twitter remarks regarding the governing body last week. These are decisions based on football priorities, even though it is legitimate to wonder if the excesses of contemporary footballers – the brashness, the sexual mores, the culture of glorifying wealth – ought to be subdued by idealistic decisions made at national team level.Hodgson now has to decide whether or not to drop Cole, who is two appearances short of 100 caps, for San Marino match on Friday night. There is a fitting excuse, since Leighton Baines of Everton has performed impressively enough this season to be due another run-out, but so many of Hodgson's decisions remain loaded with a significance that reaches beyond the routines of fitness and form. There will always be contentious views, and Peter Crouch, Rio Ferdinand, Micah Richards all have prominent supporters among pundits, but these calls are a matter of judgment. The more troubling issue for Hodgson is the evolution of his squad.A succession has been forced at centre-back now that Terry has retired from international football, but Gary Cahill, Joleon Lescott and Phil Jagielka have yet to establish that they are as capable as the Chelsea defender, or as refined as Ferdinand. Two of them, Cahill and Lescott cannot even consider themselves regular starters at their clubs. Ryan Shawcross is the fourth centre-back in the current squad, but if powerful and undaunted aggression are guaranteed with the Stoke City defender, he is not among the elite of the Barclays Premier League.This gap in quality and experience is evident throughout the England squad. Had Steven Gerrard not been suspended, Hodgson may well have deployed the Liverpool midfielder alongside Frank Lampard in central midfield on Friday, which is a reflection of the lack of competition for those places rather than the persuasive form of either player. Michael Carrick is also in the squad, while Tom Cleverley is still developing and James Milner is a steady but unconvincing performer at times. The rest of the midfield slots are taken up by attackers, in Adam Johnson, Theo Walcott, Aaron Lennon and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. Among the forwards, the over-reliance on Wayne Rooney is marked, even if Jermain Defoe has been scoring regularly and performing with aplomb for Tottenham Hotspur.The England players trained at St George's Park, the FA's new national football centre, for the first time yesterday. The facility is expected to help produce future generations of international player, but the reality for Hodgson is that too much of a gap exists between his old guard and the next batch of promising talent. Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Raheem Sterling, even Cleverley, Walcott and Oxlade-Chamberlain, are still developing. Only Joe Hart, at 25, and Rooney can be considered established international players – Hodgson has to work around that imbalance.Yet that is also one of the reasons he was offered the job. His career has been based around maximising his resources, using a strict tactical approach, endless work on the training ground and organisation to build solid, efficient teams. Harry Redknapp, his sole rival for the position, is a less resourceful manager, since so much of his career has been spent generating a sense of flux at clubs and drawing bursts of accomplishment out of the turnover of players.Redknapp has a surer touch with the press and the public, though. He is more of a maverick than Hodgson, but then both managers might have opted to select Terry and Cole rather than disregard them for non-football reasons. The truth is that in the Premier League, where idealism is treated with scepticism and glamour has become a defining emblem, players will never solely be footballers. There is no boundary with their social lives any more, and as much as Hodgson might want to focus on building a squad for 2014, there will be high-profile personal crises along the way to deal with.

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Hodgson's choice is not an option

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