An affair of the heart

DAVID Hodgson has his head in his hands and is sprawled across the over-large reproduction mahogany desk which fills most of his small office in the Reynolds Arena.

"What am I doing here?" he asks, rocking backwards and forwards.

One win in 14, second bottom of the Third Division, four points adrift, the club in administration, the wolves at the door.

But then he comes up smiling.

"I know there are people who want to buy the club, so that gives me hope, but we could possibly be..." he trails off, unable to bring himself to enunciate the inevitable. "But I don't believe we will. If I believe that, what's the point of going down to Kidderminster?

"It'd only prolong the agonies of a Sunday - Sundays are the worst days in the world when you're a beaten football manager. Horrendous. Horrible. It would be even worse believing you were about to..."

He still won't say it.

Hodgson is the man who twice returned to take up the managerial reins at Darlington, the man who, having escaped with his sanity, voluntarily returned to work under the utterly unpredictable George Reynolds.

Understanding such masochistic madness comes from listening to him talk about his footballing days. Turning 22 in 1982, he was offered the dream move: from struggling Middlesbrough to the mighty Liverpool of Ian Rush and Kenny Dalglish.

"I didn't want to go," he admits. "Why should I? I was playing in the same league as them, I was on a fantastic contract, so why would I want to give that up?"

Then comes the key. "From where I stand, I come from here and not from here," he says, first of all patting his heart before tapping his head. "This keeps my life ticking, not my head. So I follow that. So I was happy to play for the Boro."

And that, it seems, is the way it usually is with Hodgson. That's why he gave up a lucrative life as an agent to struggle at the foot of the Third, and why he returned twice to the Quakers, despite having his nose repeatedly rubbed in it by his chairmen.

"What I gave up to come to Darlo on 25 grand I don't want to even begin to tell you," he says, trying to explain how he wound up at Feethams for the first time in 1995.

"But it was in there to do it," he says, banging his chest again, "from way, way beyond professional football. Kicking around in the schoolyard I wanted to pick different players to be in my side. It was there."

That schoolyard was in Gateshead, where Hodgson was born in 1960, although he doesn't seem to have seen much of it. "I wasn't a bad student," he says, "but I probably didn't attend school as often as I should have."

At 14, he went for trials at Ipswich under Bobby Robson.

"They were wanting me to go to school there because I'd done so well, but I didn't go to school in Gateshead so there was no way they were going to get me to go to school in Ipswich," he says.

"When I was 15, I went down and blew the hotel lights by putting silver paper in the switch, and so I wasn't welcome any more in Ipswich."

Bolton Wanderers then offered him a four-year contract - two years apprentice, two years pro. "Anybody else would have snapped their hands off," he says.

But Hodgy's heart drew him to an apprenticeship at Middlesbrough and within two years, aged 19, he was established in the first team. "It was, for me, the best time," he says. "I'm the type of person who will play if I'm happy - I don't play for the sake of the game, just like I don't manage this club for the financial aspect.

"I was happy. It was the atmosphere around the town and the group of players was brilliant."

Robson at Ipswich came back for him, offering nearly £1m with Alan Brazil lined up to move in the other direction. It came to nothing, but a year or so later, when Bob Paisley came calling, Middlesbrough were in no position to turn money down.

"If I didn't go, the club would have gone pop because of the construction - and this seems to follow me around - of a massive gymnasium.

"It had cost a fortune, but they couldn't get a safety certificate for it, so it was worth nothing. The £450,000 they got for me helped keep the club going. In a way, I was forced to go. I've never had a group of directors be so nice to me."

Even though he made his debut at Wembley in the Charity Shield, Hodgy's heart never really fell in love with Anfield.

He breezed into the Liverpool first team, scored three in his first four league games alongside Rush with Dalglish in the hole just behind.

He says: "I was going over the top of Haverton Hill roundabout on the A19, looking down, and the girl I was going out with at the time said: 'Do you actually realise you are a Liverpool Football Club player.

"Have you any idea what that means?' That was the first time I'd thought about it.

"Things were a little too easy, and then I found myself out of the side through injury, and when you've got Dalglish and Rush in front of you it can get a bit disheartening.

The trips back to Teesside were frequent..."

He picked up a Championship medal in his first season at Liverpool, spent the second on the bench - including the European Cup final in Rome - and left for Sunderland before the third could start.

It was, he freely concedes, a mistake because his heart wasn't in it. "I supported Sunderland, played for the Boro, came from Gateshead: that's how I learnt to be a runner," he says.

"I was a Sunderland fan from six to 16, but my heart and genuine love became Middlesbrough because they'd given me a chance."

It is rumoured that he asked for a transfer from Sunderland in an unusual way involving a cup of tea which ended up over manager Lawrie McMenemy. He's reluctant to tell the story so we move quickly on, as he did.

"I never wanted to leave the Boro but ended up playing in three different countries," he says.

"The love of playing for the Boro had gone, so it was just a case of enjoying what opportunities came along. I played in Cadiz in Spain but never got paid for a year - but the house was lovely and the weather was great."

At 30, he quit. "I was sick of too many people sticking needles in my knees to get another game out of me, and so I gave up," he says.

He became an agent, bringing about 80 players to this country, including Emerson Thome, Bjorn Tore Kvarme and Jose Dominguez. Then he was asked to advise Sean Gregan. "I didn't know who the hell Sean Gregan was," he says, but as the phone call ended he'd somehow agreed to manage Gregan's club, Darlington.

It lasted just eight months. The club's directors told Hodgson promotion would be too expensive.

"They just came in and said put the reins on," he says.

He hatched a plot with co-manager Jim Platt to walk out and leave the directors without anyone in charge, but when Hodgson jumped Platt stayed put.

"He'd come over from Ireland, didn't have anything else whereas I was better off, but it wasn't about money - it was about the issue."

Yet less than a year later, when Platt was sacked with the club back at the bottom of the table, Hodgson returned.

"I had started something that I hadn't had the chance to finish," he explains.

This time, he built a team that reached the play-offs before Reynolds destroyed it by publicly exposing the wage structure.

"It riles me to this day," says Hodgson. "A jigsaw can only have so many pieces.

"I don't want too many players hanging on the fringes. I don't like 20-player squads; I'd rather have 16. We had four players on the wages of eight, and I would always rather have four good ones than eight bad ones.

"To me, that was good management, but all of it was thrown out."

For the second time, Hodgson walked out. He stayed out for three years as Reynolds built a magnificent stadium but neglected the team.

"I came past this place a million times and it riled me that despite all the work I had done at the club, it was now at this arena and I didn't have a chance to be in it," he says.

With the fans in open revolt last October, Reynolds came to him cap-in-hand.

"I was annoyed that he dared to ask after all I had gone through, after all the misleading information, but it was a non-personal issue," says Hodgson.

"I'd sat at home and read the Echo and listened to the radio and it sounded as if we didn't have a football team anymore: it was all about the club, the stadium, car boot sales, concerts... The team had become a nothing.

"I had to convince my wife because she had been humiliated in the national press, branded a secret agent in the football business, and that had hurt - but my kids thought it was great because they could have their birthday parties in the arena!"

He looks down at the two picture frames that occupy a corner of the large reproduction mahogany desk.

"I'm a selfish so and so," he says. "I don't give a damn what others think, but as long as those three love me I can get on with life."

Hodgy's heart may rule his head, but it is usually in the right place

Read more about the Quakers here.