Roy Hodgson's best work in England has been at clubs like Crystal Palace

The 41st anniversary of Roy Hodgson’s first league title in football will pass next month, largely unnoticed by many apart from, you would imagine, the supporters of Halmstads in southern Sweden, a club from a small North Sea holiday town who are currently back in a relegation fight in the Allsvenskan.

They won the first two top-flight titles in their history with Hodgson, who was 29 in 1976 when he landed the first, the beginning of a curious career that comes full circle back to Crystal Palace in south London where he grew up the son of a Croydon bus driver. In different circumstances, Hodgson would now be regarded as one of the eminence grise of English football, a wise old soul brought out to offer common sense verdicts on the issues of the day.

But there was, unfortunately, that unhappy Euro 2016 conclusion with England at the hands of an Iceland team – who have beaten Croatia, Turkey and Ukraine in 2018 World Cup qualifying (no excuses, just saying) - and the enforced purdah that has followed. The England manager’s job has messed up careers before, and pretty comprehensively too, but for Hodgson, who has won eight league titles at three clubs in Sweden and Denmark, it has been particularly brutal.

England manager Roy Hodgson announced his resignation after England lost 1-2 to Iceland — Hodgson's reign as England manager had a brutal ending, but he has never dwelt on the memories of one job Credit: EPA

Hodgson is back, still reviled by many, and still the only multilingual, well-travelled English coach, in an era where everyone agrees there are far too few multilingual, well-travelled English coaches. In fact, he is, at 70, the most eminent of that kind, a man who like so many of the post-war generation was eager to pursue his career wherever it might take him, which was eventually to Sweden where he and his friend Bob Houghton had a transformative effect on the Swedish game.

Palace want the Hodgson who took West Bromwich Albion in 2012 to what was then their highest top-flight finish since the Ron Atkinson years, and even more remarkably led Fulham to seventh in 2009 and the Europa League final the following year having inherited a club that was 18th in December 2007. Hodgson has been at much bigger places than those two clubs, and during his England years one always got the impression that he treasured his time at Inter Milan the most, rubbing shoulders with some of the great names from their past, the sort of famous former Italian footballers who kept their sunglasses on while eating lunch. But in England he has done his best work at clubs just like Palace and he will doubtless do a good job this time.

Roy Hodgson as Inter Milan manager — Hodgson treasured his time at Inter Milan Credit: Getty Images

Always courteous and eager to answer questions as frankly as possible, Hodgson found the England job perplexing at times. He did not understand why everything he did was connected instantly to something similar that had happened in the distant past to a different manager and different players. He was not freighted by a lot of the team’s dismal history – quite simply because he had been out of the country for much of the previous 40 years. His infamous line at his valedictory press conference about not knowing what he was doing there was just typical Hodgson honesty. He had said all he could the night before, in the aftermath of the Iceland defeat – what more was there? How was he to know that it is an English tradition to have one more interrogation of the condemned man before he is lead away?

At Fulham and West Brom he could be as he liked, and no-one much bothered him. He likes a joke and he is one of the few managers who is more than likely to strike up a conversation about something other than football. There was not much of that from Fabio Capello.

Hodgson did agonise over connecting with the younger players – and there are the obvious potential issues at Palace with Wilfried Zaha, picked and then discarded by Hodgson with England, and Andros Townsend, at the centre of the unfortunate “space monkey” episode. But at least the issue of trying to have effective communication with footballers young enough to be his grandsons was something that Hodgson worried about. For many coaches of his generation that kind of thing does not matter at all.

He remained a man who was always fascinated by the world and the challenges it presented, and not the type who preferred the easy life of the pundit’s seat and the invitation to tell it like it was in his day. Which is why he will be back on the training ground at Palace this morning, walking into a mess left by a predecessor whose famous name meant that he launched his managerial career at one of Europe’s top clubs. Hodgson had to work his way up and it is that grounding that means he will see the value in Palace’s imperfect players, from James Tomkins to Martin Kelly to Damien Delaney, in a way that Frank De Boer never could.

It has not worked for Hodgson everywhere he has gone. The United Arab Emirates job in 2002 turned into a bit of a nightmare and he used to shake his head in dismay at whatever promises were broken at Udinese in 2001. The less said about his six months at Liverpool the better. But then this is not a man who has ever felt that his legacy rested on one job, and once you have been through the England experience, the liberation from caring what anyone says must be exhilarating. He really has nothing to lose and will be the better for it.