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Leicester City would be fools not to appoint Roy Hodgson

You don’t sack a title-winning manager unless you know you can replace him with someone special, someone who can give your side a return back to excellence. You don’t, either, sack your manager if you are facing a relegation scrap for survival unless you have one of the game’s biggest motivators, or someone with a track record of beating the drop. Look at Chelsea. They removed Jose Mourinho when things started to fall apart, knowing that they had Guus Hiddink in reserve to steady the ship, as he had done before.

Similarly, when Sunderland were in the depths of a relegation scrap, they had Sam Allardyce ready to go to replace Dick Advocaat. This was a man who could get the best from limited resources, with excellent contacts in the transfer market. It worked, and Sunderland stayed up again, despite themselves.

Now, the same is happening at Leicester City. They are just two points above the relegation zone in 15th, with seven players all in danger of going down should they fail to fix their form. They then needed to have someone with the ability to motivate some downcast, disheartened professionals who have gone from a Premier League table to a relegation scrap. They are a team who had tactical variety to blitz their way to a title, but now need a pragmatic approach to getting the most out of what they have in a short time.

They need an expert. Someone who can fire up the troops and revitalise training. It has to be fun again, but it has to make the most of their pacy, attacking players. No wonder, then, that Roy Hodgson is now favourite to take over.

Hodgson will devote most of his time to rebuilding work in the summer. Some will say that this smacks of ignoring priorities, but Hodgson is a self-assured, determined man who is not interested in bowing to consensus. After all, that’s why he was prepared to work in Apartheid South Africa at a time of general boycott.

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To that end, close to 90% of his time is planned to be spent on convincing Wayne Rooney to leave Old Trafford in the summer, to join up with his former England boss at the King Power Stadium. Hodgson will offer all he can to persuade him to join, by offering him the captaincy, parity with his current wages, and the choice of where he wishes to play not just on any given match, but any given moment. Rooney is tempted to reinvent himself as nominally a right-back, but with a licence to roam. This will make the most of his ability/obsession with hitting long, diagonal balls to nobody.

An insider said: “Even as the pace sapped from his legs during the iconic 2008 season, he remained a yard ahead of his opponents in the one square foot of footballing real estate that mattered – his footballing brain.”

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Hodgson is, despite appearances and the things that he says and does, no fool. He understands that he needs to get Jamie Vardy and Riyad Mahrez firing again if he is to score the goals to keep them up. There’s an alternative if this doesn’t happen, though. He is cognisant that Leicester have conceded 44 goals already this season, and if he can fix the defence, then he can grind his way to survival instead. 10 draws and two wins should keep them up, after all.

Hodgson will, then, have to improve the tactical knowhow of the team. He must also get the fans onside who were heartbroken to see Claudio Ranieri leaves. They must entertain, be assiduousness enough to stay up, beat Sevilla and enliven the players at the club. He will thus spend every day on the training field as he did with England: organising them into two banks of four and tell them to hit it long down the channels.

To that end, Hodgson will also offer a frustrated Steven Gerrard the chance to come out of retirement, to match his absolute similarity of career paths with Paul Scholes, allowing him to spray long balls from a quarter-back role that he was so adept at.

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An insider said: “Even as the pace sapped from his legs during the iconic 2008/9 season, he remained a yard ahead of his opponents in the one square foot of footballing real estate that mattered – his footballing brain.”

The stage is set for Hodgson to use the expertise of these two footballing legends to give them something new to work with on the pitch, using all the expertise that saw him triumph at Fulham, England and Blackburn. He might be 69 now, the age at which even Alex Ferguson started to wonder if the demands of the game were too much for him. However, Hodgson has had some respite after leaving the England job, and his time there was not as intense as day-to-day management is. Hodgson believes that varied experiences have left him relatively fresh.

An insider said: An insider said: “Even as the pace sapped from his legs on the training pitch during the iconic 2007/8 Fulham season, he remained a yard ahead of his opponents in the one square foot of footballing real estate that mattered – his footballing brain.”

Hodgson has the nous on the training pitch to succeed. He has the experience to be tactically pragmatic and inventive. And most of all, having spent so long inspiring England’s best to achieve such dramatic feats in the qualifying stages of international tournaments, he has to ability to inspire. Getting rid of Ranieri was a massive call, but letting this student of the game go begging any longer would have been the real crime.