The last time I met Roy Hodgson, at Le Café Anglais, Rowley Leigh’s restaurant in Bayswater, I drew a king from the pack. I presented Roy — the West Bromwich Albion and now England manager — with Colm Tóibín’s wonderful novel The Master. Roy smiled as he laid down an ace: ‘Is this the one about Henry James? I’m afraid I’ve read it.’
Make that one-all. At a previous lunch I had given him Stefan Zweig’s masterpiece, Beware of Pity, a novel so close to my Habsburg heart that I wanted him to love it, too. It is the sort of book that defines character, never mind literary taste. ‘Magnificent,’ he told me a few weeks later.
These are not the kind of remarks one would expect from a traditional football man, at least not in this country, where players and managers have so little interest in the wider world. There is in football an oikishness, either natural or cultivated, which suits the participants. Ignorance is so highly prized that Graeme Le Saux, a sensitive chap who played for Blackburn Rovers, Chelsea and England, was considered homosexual because he read the Guardian.
In the old days a player who stayed on at school to do A-levels was usually called ‘Bamber’ after Gascoigne, the presenter of University Challenge. Yet things haven’t changed much. Harry Redknapp, the so-called ‘people’s choice’ for the job Hodgson accepted this week, told Southwark Crown Court earlier this year that he couldn’t spell his own name. It doesn’t make him a bad man. But it does reveal quite a lot about the people who work within football. Such a character, Harry.
On the field, in the stands, even in the press box, English football rejoices in its stupidity.
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