Talking Liverpool, Roy Hodgson and disparate managerial skills

The December slows in domestic soccer afforded me a dandy chance to catch up on other sports. The week between Christmas and New Year’s, stocking stuffed with EPL matches, bowl games and even a little NBA time, was the most fun I’ve had since that month at clown college. (Which seemed like a good idea at the time.)

So now that I’ve caught up a little with the sporty land beyond our grassy fields of 116 x 74, I’m not as afraid to make compare-and-contrast examples that bind these worlds.

Perfect example:

I’m thinking lately about how a coach is not necessarily a good one or bad one.  That applies to soccer as well as other sports.  Sometimes, success is a product of right person, right place, right time.  We see it all the time, even if we don’t always properly connect the dots.

In our world of goal kicks and corner kicks, we have the mercurial and tenuous situation involving Liverpool’s Roy Hodgson. Hodgson was frequently hoisted to genius status previously at Fulham, where he did more than just keep the frugal Cottagers in the top tier. Under Hodgson, Fulham finished 7^th in the Premiership’s 2008-09 season, which is a little like you or me landing a date with foxy Megan Fox: unexpected, unprecedented and rarely, if ever, to be repeated.

Not everyone thought Hodgson’s time at Fulham was all that and a bag a chips; Jen Chang at SI.com is among them, as he writes here in examining the current Anfield woe. Still, further success at Craven Cottage helped Hodgson land his current post on Merseyside.

So, back to the topic du jour: Why are we so surprised when success here doesn’t lead to success there?

After all, a disparate skills set is just that. Relating to and reaching the kind of player who lands at Craven Cottage is one thing. Relating to and reaching the swashbuckling starlet who lands at Anfield is another can of herring altogether. And the tactical approach must be turned upside down from one place to the other; dodging the hunter is one thing, while doing the hunting is surely something else. Chang’s take dives heavily into that aspect.

Aside from his take on how matters at Anfield are unraveling so spectacularly, New York Times’ vet Rob Hughes just wrote about another pox on the Liverpool pitch. His piece peeks at Liverpool’s identity crisis from a historical standpoint, and it’s worth the read.

All this is certainly nothing unique to soccer – and here’s where my re-discovery of worlds beyond soccer connects the concepts.

Look at Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez, whose success previously at West Virginia led to a higher profile post in Ann Arbor. Long story short, Michigan is now a freakin’ mess. But should that really be such a surprise? I did my time covering college sports, and I can tell you that coaching football or basketball at a headliner university is wrought with politics. The amount of glad handing, back slapping and warding off interference is something that coaches just don’t deal with at lower profile positions. The recruiting is very different; not necessarily harder or easier, better or worse, just different.

So, it seems reasonable that certain coaches are just going to be better under a specific set of circumstances.

Look at it like this: my girlfriend is an amazing cook -- but my girl can’t bake her way out of a paper bag. Put her in charge of dinner and she rocks.  Put her on cake duty and you’ve got Michigan football on your hands.  One job in the kitchen just isn’t like the other one, see?