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Remarkable job by Roy at Fulham
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TOPIC: Remarkable job by Roy at Fulham
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Re:Remarkable job by Roy at Fulham 14 Years, 1 Month ago
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Well done to Roy (as well as to Rafa, of course) last night. Amazing victory.
This is an excerpt of an interview well worth a glance. Roy is a refreshing figure in a sport dominated by 'orrible Sam Allardyce types:
Roy Hodgson has just finished the Philip Roth novella Indignation, the title of which might describe the Premier League's favourite emotional state. Fulham's manager admits he can lose his rag with the best of them, but has 33 years of experience in club and international coaching to help him gauge reality.
He has literature, too, because Fabio Capello's potential successor as England coach scours bookshops for masterpieces the way he scans the game's talent markets. Sebastian Faulks visited Fulham's training ground recently, in search of insights for a character he was creating, but it was Hodgson who demanded all the tips.
He takes up the story: "Birdsong was one of the best books I'd ever read. When I was at Blackburn [in 1997-98], I talked about authors I liked and mentioned Sebastian. He must have seen it and sent me his new book through the post, Charlotte Gray, which he'd autographed.
"That was 10 or 11 years ago. Then one day I was told that he wanted to come down to Fulham and look over the training ground, because one of the characters in his next book was a footballer. I was delighted. He invited me to the book launch and in his speech said, 'I've seen Roy Hodgson here today, I'd like to thank him, but I went to Fulham to talk to him about football and he was more interested in talking to me about books.' It's true. I kept saying - 'What about this one, what about that one?'"
In football, you can always find another right-back, but Hodgson's fascination for literature is such that he has exhausted many of the "greats" and may need an army of book-reviewing scouts to keep his mind stretched, away from the training ground, where he is omni-present, and Capello-like in his imposition of principles.
"Indignation. Very, very good, it was," he is saying. "I thought I'd read them all. Isaac Bashevis Singer and [Saul] Bellow are two others. The problem I have now is that I'm always trying to find new authors, because ones like Updike and Roth and Bellow - you end up reading them all. Those people are hard to find. I found one recently: Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty."
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