Roy Hodgson set to make return to football with Crystal Palace, but is ex-England boss the right man for the Selhurst Park job?
JUST 77 days after his appointment, Crystal Palace decided to get rid of Frank de Boer, replacing him with Roy Hodgson.
The former England manager will take over at a club which has lost all of its four Premier League games this season, failing to score in any of them.
But is he the right man for the job? Our friends at Football Whispers take a look.
There is no doubt that Hodgson’s name has been tarnished by the Euro 2016 debacle.
England were expected to breeze past Iceland in the last 16, but Hodgson presided over an awful performance as the Three Lions lost 2-1 to the minnows.
The 70-year-old hasn’t had a managerial job since then and Palace fans will be wary of him making their team as similarly uninspiring.
Although it surely cannot get any worse than four matches, four losses and no goals.
Hodgson’s critics will also point to his disastrous spell at Liverpool, which saw him sacked after just six months at Anfield.
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But either side of his spell with the Reds, he was at Fulham and West Brom, and did a very good job at Craven Cottage and The Hawthorns.
Both sides were in a similar situation to Palace at the moment – they were clubs of similar stature struggling towards the bottom of the Premier League.
At Fulham, Hodgson came in after Lawrie Sanchez left and masterminded a great escape, with Fulham staying up on the last day of the 2007-08 season.
Not only that, the following season, he led them to a record seventh-placed finish in 2008-09, which saw them qualify for the Europa League.
His exploits in that competition, taking Fulham to the Europa League final with wins on the way against the likes of Juventus, mean many Whites fans see him as their greatest ever boss.
After losing his Liverpool job in January 2011, he took over at West Brom the following month, replacing Roberto Di Matteo.
The Italian has presided over a poor run of form which saw the Baggies slip towards the relegation zone after losing 13 of their previous 18 league matches.
Hodgson oversaw five wins and five draws from his 12 Premier League games in the 2011-12 season, leading them to 11th in the table – their highest league finish for three decades.
He went one better the following year, with West Brom ending the season in tenth, which saw him get the England job.
The Palace board will see how he took over clubs of a similar standing within the Premier League who were on a downward spiral and not only kept them in the league, took them up it, giving them one of their best finishes for a while.
That’s what they hope he will do at Selhurst Park – he seems the perfect man for the job.
He may have had disappointment at the end with England, but his qualifying campaigns were arguably smoother than Gareth Southgate’s is at the moment.
Palace will be his 20th managerial job – there is no way a manager gets that many roles, including taking charge of Inter, Udinese and Switzerland if he doesn’t have something about him.
With hindsight, what is surprising is that Hodgson didn’t take over in the summer.
He has links to Crystal Palace, after growing up nearby in Croydon and being in the youth team as a player, and was a much more logical fit after the previous managers than de Boer.
The Dutchman inherited a team built by the likes of Alan Pardew and Sam Allardyce and was never going to be able to instil his Ajax way of playing with the Palace squad in four games.
The Eagles’ previous five permanent managers were Ian Holloway, Tony Pulis, Neil Warnock, Pardew and Allardyce.
De Boer was too far of a shift away from them, while Hodgson isn’t.
His style, built on a solid defence, will suit Palace down to the ground, as they look to stay in the Premier League.