Blame it on Roy!

Uruguay coach Oscar Tabarez shakes hands with Roy Hodgson after the match. — AP

The players will undoubtedly take some of the blame for two pretty tepid performances to date, but the bloke who deserves to bear the brunt of it is our very own Roy of the (Blackburn) Rovers, Mr Hodgson.

For a man accustomed to dropping a PR clanger every now and again, singling out Uruguay’s best player in Luis Suarez and saying he hadn’t achieved greatness yet was brilliant buffoonery of the red rag to bull kind.

Hodgson has to learn the forward defensive stroke in press conferences. When a journalist next asks about a world-class player, there’s no harm in stating the bleeding obvious and honestly adding: “We’ll try our best to mark him and minimise his impact.”

That approach though could also leave him subject to ridicule I suppose considering Phil Jagielka’s penalty box daydreaming as Suarez ghosted in for his first and Steven Gerrard’s gift-wrapped back header for number two. If ball watching won trophies, England would be clasping the World Cup by now.

The deficiencies of the team aside, a coach of Hodgson’s experience should know that trying to antagonise a player of Suarez’s calibre usually only has one result and it’s invariably not a good one. His counterpart with Uruguay, Oscar Tabarez, probably didn’t need to say much in terms of a pep talk to Suarez in the build-up to the game. He presumably just handed his ace card a selection of the English tabloids and left him to do the rest.

He certainly did that in predatory showing that left England on the brink of early elimination and Hodgson fielding questions as to his future. “I don’t have any intention to resign,” he replied in the post-match post mortem. “I’ve been really happy with the way the players have responded to the work we’ve tried to do. I’m bitterly disappointed of course, but I don’t feel I need to resign.

“On the other hand, if the FA think I’m not the right man to do the job, that will be their decision not mine.”

Hodgson added: “Our chances of going through are unbelievably slim. We depend on Italy winning their next two matches and us beating Costa Rica by the requisite number of goals. “To continue, we needed a result against Uruguay. We needed a victory and we didn’t get it.”

alex@khaleejtimes.com