Roy Hodgson reveals the one reason his Liverpool sacking 'hurt'

Roy Hodgson says he has one reason why his sacking at Liverpool hurt - even if he understood it. The Reds struggled with him at the helm.

Roy Hodgson was always going to have a difficult task replacing Rafa Benitez as Liverpool boss. The Spaniard had won the Champions League, after all, as well as narrowly missing out on the Premier League just a year before his sacking.

But even if it was going to be difficult, Hodgson's reign was a far bigger disaster than anyone predicted. He'd got the job on the back of incredible success at Fulham but Liverpool sat in the relegation zone during his brief tenure.

The veteran boss, though, did join at a strange time. Liverpool were in dire straights financially, with Martin Broughton arriving as Chairman after Tom Hicks and George Gillett were forcibly pushes out of control. There wasn't any money, essentially, and the club was actively seeking new owners.

They found them in New England Sports Ventures, now FSG, but their arrival was in October 2010 - after the transfer window. Liverpool would have money to spend, though they'd need to wait until January.

Hodgson didn't last that long. Liverpool's awful form saw him sacked in favour of Kenny Dalglish at the start of 2011 and it has the now-Crystal Palace boss wondering what could have been.

His one regret is that the 'honour' of managing Liverpool didn't arrive at a more stable time for the club.

"Liverpool's a fantastic football club and it's a real honour to be invited to be the manager of Liverpool," Hodgson told TNT Sports. "I didn't probably get invited to be the manager of the club at the best possible time. It came after the success with Fulham so I suppose that's why they went for me.

"Of course, the problem was that we started badly, we didn't win enough games and as a result we were down in mid-table and unfortunately you don't survive that especially when Kenny was in the wings ready to take over.

"My dismissal there was one that I took more sanguinely than the Blackburn one. It only hurt in the sense that I was disappointed that if I could've come in here with a slightly different possibility to change things, transfer window [with] a bit of money to spend and more time with the players.

"But all managers say that."

Hodgson is almost certainly right that he'd have done better at a more stable time and with more flexibility in what he was able to do. But he also just wasn't a good fit for the club - plenty of his comments rubbed fans the wrong way and it was clear he didn't quite 'get' the mentality of Liverpool.

The style of football, too, just didn't work. That's despite having Steven Gerrard at his disposal, as well as Fernando Torres up top. It wasn't the right fit and stable conditions or not, it's unlikely Hodgson was ever going to work out in the end.