The Betfair Debate: Should Roy Hodgson Go?

Should he stay or should he go?

With England on the way home from Brazil after their worst World Cup performance since 1958, Dan Thomas argues that Roy Hodgson should pay the price with his job. But Luke Moore insists the former West Brom boss faced an impossible task...

Yes

In the immediate aftermath of England's defeat to Uruguay, I didn't join the social media hordes demanding Roy Hodgson's head - indeed I tweeted 'not sure about the Hodgson hate, just a lack of quality options'.

You can't blame Hodgson for Steven Gerrard and Phil Jagielka's errors, I thought, or for Wayne Rooney's missed chances. That's football.

But as the days have gone on - and England stuttered to a point against a strolling Costa Rica that was apparently 'something to cheer about'  - I am beginning to come around to the view that the manager should follow in Cesare Prandelli's footsteps and do the decent thing.

There's a view that Hodgson was hamstrung by a dearth of quality, particularly in defence, but look at Chile: their central defence included a player released by Nottingham Forest and a midfielder who was relegated with Cardiff last season and yet they qualified from their group in great style. 

The difference between the two teams? One is managed by a coach who has a defined system and a strategy and picks the best players to fit into it. The other is England.

Hodgson fell into the trap of simply picking the best performing club players and trying to shoehorn them into the system.

You can't play a 4-2-3-1 without a recognised defensive midfielder; Jordan Henderson may have had a terrific season, but it's hard to argue Michael Carrick wouldn't have done a better job screening the back four. And while Daniel Sturridge was the outstanding English striker last season, can he play upfront on his own? Not on the evidence of this World Cup - he dropped deep far too often.

Hodgson's substitutions, meanwhile, did nothing to alter the pattern of play during any of the three games.

The strongest argument for keeping the former Fulham and West Brom boss in charge is probably the lack of viable replacements but England's performance in Brazil was so poor that he simply must pay the price.

Dan Thomas

No

To sack Roy Hodgson now is to completely ignore the problems that face England on a two-year cycle with now-alarming regularity. It's akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. 

In order to enter the process of terminating someone's employment, it must surely be pursued with the intention of improving the fortunes of the operation you're running, and at the moment there is simply no-one better to take the reins, based on the FA's own (somewhat warped) agenda. 

The FA won't employ another foreigner, it is simply too early after the Fabio Capello debacle, and Greg Dyke has intimated that he'd prefer an Englishman to do the job. There is currently no Englishman working in top level football that is more qualified and experienced than Hodgson, as depressing as that sounds. And even if there was someone with the credentials, it wouldn't solve the problem anyway.

This is because, as a nation, we are fully committed to piling the blame of failure on whoever happens to be in charge at the time and then automatically moving on to the next sacrificial lamb, repeating the cycle while simultaneously ignoring the root-and-branch problems that infiltrate our game like a cancer. A cancer that is growing and becoming ever more malignant.

Until we start looking in on ourselves and truly address the multifarious problems that we so clearly have in abundance - lack of coaches, lack of educational variety in coaching, a refusal to embrace the middle-class (now the largest class in England by some distance, and therefore the largest talent pool), prohibitively expensive coaching courses, refusal of English players to play overseas, joyless, asinine and shallow coverage of football in almost all media - we will never improve and never achieve.

Because those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. 

I don't blame Hodgson for England's failure the same way I don't blame the hearse for taking a coffin to a funeral. 

Why don't we, for once, take some time to look at why the death occurred in the first place?

Luke Moore

England are favourites to win their Euro 2016 qualifying group, which sees them up against Switzerland, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania and San Marino.

What do you think? Stay or go? Let us know by commenting below