Re: Liverpool Thread
Hodgson thinks he is as good as Ferguson.....
an eerie similarity with his current plight at Liverpool....
from wikipedia...
Internazionale
Before the European Championships, Hodgson joined Italian Serie A giants Internazionale, where he worked from 1995 to 1997. With significant investment, he presided over a rebuilding phase. Inter had finished 13th and 6th in the seasons prior to his arrival. After a terrible start to the season, Hodgson was brought in and guided the club to 7th place in the 1995–96 season, qualifying for the UEFA Cup. The 1996–97 season saw Hodgson leave Inter after 14 wins, 13 draws and 5 losses in Serie A, with Inter placed 3rd in the league, and was replaced by Luigi Simoni whose side finished 2nd in the league in the 1997-8 season and won the UEFA Cup. Hodgson says of his time at Inter, "We lacked stars, apart from Paul Ince. It wasn't the Inter we see today of household names. They weren't the best technically but physically they were like machines. The Premier League is like that now, but back then Italy was far ahead."[7]
Hodgson managed to get his Inter side, containing Javier Zanetti, Youri Djorkaeff and Paul Ince, through to the 1997 UEFA cup final where they would play Schalke 04. Given that Inter had a recent history of winning UEFA cup finals with victories in both 1990 and 1994, the Italian side started as favorites. When the German underdogs won the final in Milan Inter fans pelted Hodgson with coins and lighters.
Hodgson later admitted that throughout his two and a half years at Inter there had been regular speculation that he would get the sack but insisted he had had the support of the owners.
Blackburn Rovers
In the 1997 close season, Hodgson was tempted by Jack Walker to become manager of Blackburn Rovers. Rovers had finished 13th the previous season – only 2 seasons after winning the title — and had been in danger of relegation. Manager Ray Harford had quit on 25 October 1996 with Blackburn winless, bottom of the Premier League and just knocked out of the Football League Cup by Division Two underdogs Stockport County. Coach Tony Parkes had been put in charge for the rest of the season and overseen an improvement in league form to secure survival, but it was clear that chairman Walker wanted a more experienced man to build a side capable of regaining the form of a few years earlier[citation needed], and Hodgson accepted the offer to take over.
In the 1997–98 season, his first season in charge, Blackburn finished 6th, qualifying for the UEFA cup and appearing to be in the ascendancy - especially as they had been outsiders in the title race for more than half of the season and Hodgson had been voted Premier League Manager of the Month on two occasions.The team's form collapsed dramatically in the second half of the season and it was only on the last day of the season that they secured a UEFA place.[13]
However, Hodgson's second season with Blackburn did not live up to the standards of the first: due to numerous injuries,[14], dressing room unrest, the failure to find an adequate replacement for departed central defender Colin Hendry[15] and a succession of poor buys – notably the £7.5 million Kevin Davies — Blackburn had a disastrous start to the season and Hodgson was sacked in December 1998, with the club bottom of the league table.[16] As Hodgson later explained Blackburn's owner gave him the chance to resign honorably but he refused to do so, leaving the club with no option but to sack him: "To Blackburn's honour, Jack Walker wanted me to resign, he wanted to still pay for the rest of my contract. He said, 'Why don't you resign? You've had enough, it's not working out.' I refused to do that, arrogant of course as I was in those days.I thought if they stuck with me I'd save them from relegation. I do think that the players were very much still with me, so I couldn't resign because that would be a suggestion that in some way I was doing something or something was happening which I didn't see to be the case or the truth. I gave him no choice but to sack me".[17] His final game was a home defeat to Southampton.[16][18]
Hodgson later complained that his failure at Blackburn tarnished his reputation in England, whilst his record on the continent should have made him comparable to Sir Alex Ferguson: "Of course, my track record, if people bothered to study it, would put me in the same category as [Sir Alex] Ferguson enjoys today, but people don't talk about what I've done outside England," he says. "Here, they just talk about Blackburn Rovers, but that's just a very small part of a 26-year career. To most English journalists it's the only part. I've got an excellent track record in Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and in Denmark, where FC Copenhagen was my last job before I went to Udinese. We won the league there by seven points. Admittedly, the fact that I walked out and went to Italy to some extent tarnished that reputation..."[19]
