Former Liverpool manager Roy Hodgson has admitted he should never have been appointed to the role and says it is dangerous to take a job on a high.
Hodgson succeeded the sacked Rafael Benitez and won just 13 of 31 games during a six-month spell before being fired in January 2011 and replaced by Kenny Dalglish. The former Fulham and Inter Milan boss, who later managed England, struggled to build a rapport with the Liverpool fanbase.
Hodgson reflects on PR failure
The 79-year-old accepts he failed in the public relations battle during a difficult period for the club.
"I should maybe have thought things through a bit better and thought 'maybe I need to be very careful here'," said Hodgson. "And I don't know how I'd have done it."
"It would probably have involved a PR exercise with the fans, to try and win them round to the idea that they could trust me to do the job, and then give me and the team a chance to go through a bad period. I didn't do very well there, I don't think. So I don't feel hard done by."
"I think it's dangerous to go to jobs on a high, and I did go on a high. I'd had a very, very successful period in Finland, and at Fulham. It was a period of nothing but pats on the back. So I felt 'I can do this job. All I've got to do is do what I've done in Finland, do what I've done at Fulham, and it'll work'."
Appointment questioned
Hodgson believes the people who appointed him should have chosen Dalglish instead.
"Probably, if the people who appointed me had been a bit wiser or a bit more calculating in the first place, they'd just have said 'Well, we like the idea of Roy, and we think he might do a good job for us, but really, this job's got to go to Kenny Dalglish at this time'," he said.
He also believes the squad he inherited from Benitez and the players signed during his tenure, including Paul Konchesky, Christian Poulsen, Joe Cole and Danny Wilson, meant there was little chance of short-term success.
"I don't think the players we had were, if you like, nailed on to get seventh in the league," he said. "We had Carragher, of course, and some of the others like Gerrard. They were the ones, I suppose, we were hoping would pull us through."
"But a lot of the other players were not the household names you'd expect Liverpool's to be. And one or two of the other ones that you thought might do it for you, like Torres, he unfortunately wasn't the Torres of the previous seasons. I think that season was always going to be a difficult one."
No complaints over sacking
Hodgson was appointed during the final period of the Tom Hicks and George Gillett ownership and was sacked by new owners Fenway Sports Group, then known as New England Sports Ventures, less than two months after they took over.
Speaking to the Jeff Stelling Show, produced by OLBG and set to be released in November, Hodgson had no complaints about his removal.
"To be fair, I don't feel harshly treated as such," he said. "No. I think new owners came in, we weren't winning games, we weren't playing very well, and the team was far too low in the table for what was expected of them, even though I don't think we were the team that people had expected Liverpool to be that season."
"So no, I don't feel hard done by, and I don't think I was badly treated in any way. I don't feel any antipathy at all towards the club. I'm just disappointed that I didn't handle the situation better, because I could have been more."
