2013-05-21T05:06:43-04:00 Kieran Connell http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=keiran-connell Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Kieran Connell Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1464336 2012-04-30T10:18:05-04:00 2012-06-30T05:12:02-04:00

Kieran Connell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keiran-connell/ 'Hodgson for England' chants really began to ring around Anfield. The defeat was just one low-point among many during Roy Hodgson's short, ill-fated reign as Liverpool manager - when he was finally sacked in January 2011 his legacy was to leave Liverpool hovering above the relegation zone with their worst start to a season since 1953-1954, when they were relegated. Few observers at Anfield during the Wolves game could have predicted that less than 18 months later Hodgson actually would be on the cusp of taking charge of the national team.

Hodgson's success in the English game - if you can call it that as he is yet to win an English trophy in 40 years of management, meaning he has a worse record than almost any previous English manager - have all come at clubs where expectations were negligible. Fulham were almost on their knees when he was surprisingly appointed in December 2007, seemingly dead certs to be relegated. Hodgson revived them, saved them from the drop and the following year took them to the final of the much-maligned Europa League (where they eventually lost to Atletico Madrid). Hodgson has performed a similar ship-steadying feat at West Bromwich Albion (albeit minus the eye-catching cup run).

But it is his time at Liverpool that is perhaps most instructive of the type of manager England fans can expect - Liverpool are, after all, one of the few clubs where the expectation is, rightly or wrongly, equal to that of the national team - arguably more so. So what can his time at Liverpool tell us about what Hodgson's England will look like?

Tactically, Hodgson has barely wavered from the tried and tested, rigid 4-4-2 that was a staple of the British game during the 1970s and 1980s. In spite of the fact that the vast majority of players were used to the 4-2-3-1 system deployed by Hodgson's predecessor, Rafa Benitez, Hodgson persisted with 4-4-2 at Liverpool. Indeed, early on in his reign, Hodgson was asked about this issue by a British journalist (recounted on his Twitter page here). His response was instructive: "However you describe them", Hodgson apparently remarked, "a lot of tactics are the same". But as most football fans know, a lot of tactics are generally not the same, and the problem with a rigid 4-4-2 is that it is very easy to get outnumbered and outfought in midfield. Indeed, this is precisely what happened to Hodgson's Liverpool time and again - and was also a key issue in England's humiliation at the hands of Germany during the last World Cup).

In terms of a style of football, Hodgson likes his defenders to play long from the back - a hallmark of his time at Anfield were the long balls played by Jamie Carragher and Martin Skrtel into the channels for Fernando Torres to chase. Indeed, Hodgson alienated many of Liverpool's more cultured defenders through his insistence that the first priority should be the long ball. Glen Johnson, one of the most attacking full-backs in the country, made it clear he was unhappy with Hodgson's 'boring' style of play, while Daniel Agger complained that he was "a footballer who keeps the ball on the floor. I'm here to play, not to unload."

Hodgson won't, of course, be signing players for England, but his purchases for Liverpool are indicative of the kind of players he might try to utilise for the national team - players he thinks he can trust. Hodgson's transfer budget was far more meagre compared to that which Dalglish has enjoyed, but where he was given money to spend he largely spent it on players with whom he had previously worked, or those who he regarded as being able to fit into his blueprint for the future. So in came 30-year-old journeyman Christian Poulsen for £4.5million, a player who was often the subject of ridicule at Juventus but with whom Hodgson had known from his time in Denmark. To solve Liverpool's problem left-back position, Hodgson opted for 29-year-old Paul Konchesky, for whom Hodgson gave his former club Fulham £4million plus two promising academy players. Both signings were almost immediately shipped out by Kenny Dalglish, Konchesky to Championship sides Nottingham Forest and then Leicester, Poulsen to French side Évian.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of Hodgson's time at Liverpool was a fatal inability to grasp the heightened expectations that were now resting upon his shoulders. He was unable - or unwilling - to recognise that the job of managing Liverpool is fundamentally different from that of managing the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland or Fulham. Following an uninspiring draw at home to Sunderland, for example, Hodgson quipped that it was a 'very commendable' result and that "we deserved our point". After an embarrassing defeat against local rivals Everton, Hodgson suggested that what many saw as a dire performance was in fact "as good as we have played all season". Hodgson described a last-minute victory against Bolton at Anfield as a "famous victory". Comments such as these may be acceptable in Sweden, Finland or even at the Hawthornes. But to the Anfield faithful, they were patronising in the extreme.

If Hodgson is to be a success with England, it is the weight of expectation that he will, belatedly, have to come to terms with. If his time at Liverpool is anything to go by, England fans had better expect a bumpy ride.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1193392 2012-01-09T05:54:14-05:00 2012-03-10T05:12:01-05:00

Kieran Connell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keiran-connell/ The Iron Lady, and the frankly disturbing promotional campaign that features images of Meryl Streep as Margaret plastered on buses and advertising billboards across Britain, has of course made an important contribution to this.

Writing in today's Daily Telegraph, for example, Boris Johnson argues that "nothing and no one has done more, in the 22 years since she was kicked out of office, to rehabilitate Margaret Thatcher". For Boris, The Iron Lady is the 'most important political film for years'.

But the truth is that Thatcher nostalgia has been present in Britain, underneath the surface, for far longer. In a 2002 poll conducted by the BBC, Thatcher was named as one of 100 Greatest Britons. One of Gordon Brown's first acts as prime minister was to invite Thatcher to take tea at Number 10. Then there was confirmation last month that Thatcher would be receiving a state funeral - the first prime minister since Winston Churchill to do so - though the plans were originally put in place under the last Labour government. Even the current leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, has confessed to being a 'Maggie fan'.

It is, of course, hardly a revelation that Thatcher was a popular leader, even if the enthusiasm from the Labour leadership is rather galling. Thatcher did, after all, win three general election victories. But it is important that the Thatcher nostalgia does not contribute to the re-writing of history. Thatcher improved many people's quality of life, particularly those in the south of England. But her policies also led to the lives of many others being ruined.

Thatcher is well known for her confrontations with the unions, particularly her hard-line and ultimately victorious stance against the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984. Whatever your political views on the dispute, however, the human tragedy of Thatcher's decision to close the pits in areas such as Yorkshire and South Wales should never be lost sight of. As an antidote to Thatcher, go and rent Ken Loach's Which Side Are You On?, a documentary from the point of view of the miners and their families, or buy No Redemption, a collection of photographs by Keith Pattison and interviews by the author David Peace in Easington, what was once a mining village in Durham. You will see that the dispute was not, as is often presented in the Thatcher nostalgia, simply one between radical, fat cat union leaders and the PM sticking to her guns. Thatcher's stance had devastating consequences for the livelihoods of workers, families and whole communities.

There are other, less well-known policies that had equally destructive effects on the lives of different communities. It is an irony that when Thatcher embarked on the hugely popular Falklands War in 1982, the 2,000 islanders she was fighting for no longer qualified for British citizenship as a direct result of Thatcher's Nationality Act of the previous year. Thatcher quickly made an exception for the Falklanders; the Act was designed to limit the entry of mostly black and Asian migrants from the 'New Commonwealth', and resulted in the break-up of many families as siblings, cousins and grandparents - many of whom already resided in Britain - no longer had the right to stay as a result of Thatcher's redefinition of 'Britishness'.

Then there is unemployment. Thatcher's was the first government of the post-war era to abandon a commitment to full employment. Unemployment was regarded by the Thatcher government as being 'a price worth paying' in order to keep inflation to a minimum. In 1983, the official unemployment rate had reached 13 per cent of the population. But this is only half the story. There was significant regional variation to the joblessness figures. In parts of the south, unemployment was barely half the national average. But in inner-city areas, and across cities like Liverpool, unemployment rates often approached 50 per cent. As was recently revealed, Thatcher was eventually persuaded not to 'abandon' Liverpool following the Toxteth riots in 1981. But for those living there - as in many other areas of the North and the Midlands - a sense of abandonment was all too real.

In the end, perhaps Thatcher's greatest legacy is the way in which her policies led to a fundamental division in the country. To those who were able to take advantage of Thatcher's decision to allow tenants to purchase their council houses, for example, or to Tory and some Labour politicians, Thatcher remains a hero. But to many others, like the group of retired coal workers who recently staged a protest against the screening of Thatcher in Chesterfield, she was anything but. As the Thatcher nostalgia reaches fever pitch, we must not allow it to distort the historical reality.
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Kieran Connell http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keiran-connell/ unemployment figures without really understanding them. When you actually go to sign on, you understand them. Once I got inside the Job Centre, there were not enough seats for everyone to sit down on. As I overheard one member of staff apologetically tell his client, "sorry about the delay, I'm being bombarded from left, right and centre."

In a recent survey conducted in 23 countries by the BBC World Service, unemployment was rated as the world's "fastest-rising worry", with unemployment mentioned by 18% of respondents, six times the number of people who had mentioned it two years ago previously.

Yet in Britain, at least, there is evidence that attitudes towards the unemployed are hardening. Another poll, the British Social Attitudes Survey, found a significant decline in support for the poor and unemployed. 63% of the 3,000 people who were questioned argued that child poverty was as a result of parents who "don't want to work", while 54% of people believed that unemployment benefit - at £67 a week - is too high, up from 35% in 1983.

The idea that we live in a nation of "undeserving" poor and benefit "scroungers" - long peddled by the right-wing press - is seemingly becoming the dominant perception of the unemployed in Britain. However, when you actually go to sign on, you often get a very different impression.

There are clearly a number of problems with the way the unemployed are currently helped to get back into work in this country. At the moment, with unemployment at 2.64 million now at its highest levels since 1994, Job Centres are being stretched to breaking point. If the government is serious about helping people get back into work, they are going to have to double the number of staff and vastly increase the hours Job Centres stay open for. There simply aren't enough hours in a nine to five day for staff to even attempt to cater adequately for needs of each individual claimant that walks through the door.

Another issue is sheer range of people who are affected by unemployment. When I go to sign on there are young people straight out of school, pregnant women, older men in suits, people who don't speak English as a first language, people with learning difficulties and those, like me, who have just come out of higher education. It is little wonder, then, that the advice you receive often seems totally irrelevant to the particular position that you find yourself in. The advisor I spoke to was shocked when I listed my nine GCSEs, while the man in the 'CV clinic' I attended told me I should 'tone it down' if I wanted to get a job.

The impression you get from people inside the Job Centre is not that they are 'scrounging' off the state. You get a sense that people are desperate. The process of signing on at least in part contributes to this desperation. When I first went to sign on I was given an appointment but spent two hours waiting for it, time I could have spent actively seeking work. The room is hot and stuffy, there are signs everywhere telling you violence will not be accepted, and burly security guards walk around staring at you. If you aren't demoralised when you arrive at the Job Centre, you certainly are by the time you leave it.

One of the consequences of the lack of space in Job Centres is a lack of privacy. You sit and wait to see an advisor just feet away from someone else's advisory meeting, and as a result you cannot help but hear the sense of desperation in people's voices. One person I sat next to spoke of their attempts to get a job with his head literally in his hands.

There is an unwritten law amongst people who are signing on that you don't acknowledge each other's presence. You wait in silence, read the paper, get your phone out, but you don't speak to one another, or even make eye contact. I think this because of the stigma attached to being unemployed. I have only been signing on for two weeks, but already I can feel the process affecting my self-confidence. The really bad news in this week's unemployment figures was the rise in the number of people who are long-term unemployed. Even in the absence of much help from the government, like most people in the Job Centre, I'm doing my best get out of there as soon as possible.]]>