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Author Topic: Jimmy Hogan  (Read 1122 times)

Offline PeterWithesShin

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Jimmy Hogan
« on: March 08, 2018, 04:18:41 PM »
Article by Mat Kendrick in the BM.

Quote
November 25, 1953 underlined Jimmy Hogan’s reputation as one of football’s most influential coaches, confirmed his popularity on the continent and exposed the folly of his long exclusion from the English game.

Hogan, working as Aston Villa’s youth-team coach, took a group of the club’s youngsters to watch England versus Hungary at Wembley and told them they were about to witness something special.

He was right. But then he always did boast remarkable footballing foresight.

This was young and Hungary long before modern managers' ‘young and hungry’ motto.

The humbling 6-3 defeat to the ‘Magical Magyars’ was the Three Lions’ first loss to foreign opposition on home soil.

It was regarded as a wake-up call, even though, with the exception of 1966, English football still to this day presses the snooze button and dozes off again too often.

The Hungarians dedicated their watershed win to a 71-year-old spectator sitting in the stands.

“Jimmy Hogan taught us everything we know about football,” said Hungarian FA president, Sandor Barcs, moments after Ferenc Puskas and Co’s tactics, technique, speed of thought and deed had exposed their hosts as plodding, overly-physical philistines. Think Wimbledon versus Barcelona.

Hogan, during title-winning spells at Budapest club MTK 30 years earlier, had paved the way for the Hungarians to play a formative brand of what would later be known as ‘total football’.

He did likewise with Austria and Germany, where he is still revered as a prominent forefather of passing football, and, to a lesser extent, France, Holland and Switzerland.

In Austria he is credited with being the inspiration for the Austrian ‘wunderteam’ of the 1930s as a mentor for manager Hugo Meisl.

Despite an unremarkable playing career as an inside-forward for Burnley, Fulham, Swindon and Bolton in the early 1900s, he became a coach of some repute, preaching the type of mastery of the ball which is now seen as the pinnacle of footballing excellence.

But Hogan just couldn’t command the same love back home.

Pioneering methods decades ahead of his time were at odds with the more rudimentary English style of play.

During a brief return to England after being held as a prisoner of war in Austria during World War I, he was cruelly regarded as a traitor for having the temerity to coach foreign players.

He preached playing football “on the carpet”, yet it took Villa’s invitation in 1936 for his home nation to really roll out the carpet and welcome him back, after a management spell at Fulham a few years earlier ended when he was harshly sacked in hospital as he recovered from appendicitis.

His claret and blue career started when legendary Villa board-member Frederick Rinder witnessed Hogan leading Austria to the final of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and persuaded him to return to England. Arriving at Villa, Hogan outlined his philosophy: “I am a teacher and lover of constructive football with every pass, every kick, every movement an object.”

Villa had been relegated from the top flight for the first time under Jimmy McMullan and Hogan’s warning that it would take time for his style, with the emphasis on ball control, to reap rewards rang true as Villa finished ninth in their initial season in Division Two

But the following year, 1939-40, they roared back on a wave of flowing football, winning the Second Division title and making the FA Cup semi-final, where they were beaten by Preston.

The crowds lapped up the entertaining football with the club posting its highest average attendance up to that time of around 42,000.

There was controversy on a summer tour of Germany when the team gave the Nazi salute under duress after initially resisting the demands of their hosts.

But the feeling was that Villa were on the up with Eric Houghton among a host of players Hogan regarded as the most talented group he had ever worked with.

Frank Broome, Alex Massie and Ronnie Starling were among the others, while Hogan broke with convention by using Jimmy Allen as a midfield centre-half.

Villa finished 12th in their first season back in Division One in a campaign marred by the death of Rinder on Christmas Day, but the following year World War II broke out. Players were paid off, Villa Park was comandeered by the War Office and Hogan left before his revolution had chance to really take off.

After coaching Brentford and Celtic, Hogan returned to Villa in 1953. He ran the youth team and was a trusted advisor to Houghton, who was now manager. Villa won the 1957 FA Cup and Houghton and Hogan laid the groundwork for the Mercer’s Minors era under Joe Mercer.

Hogan retired, aged 77, in November 1959 after Houghton was sacked, 18 months after the FA Cup win, but continued to scout for Villa.

Both his spells at Villa prompted exciting upturns in fortunes and, although his purist methods were not always embraced, were the only times he enjoyed the same kind of respect in England as he had done across Europe.

Much of the resistance to his forward-thinking ways was the view that experienced players did not need coaching and his hands-on style style was in contrast to the conventional more removed approach of most managers, as was his emphasis on skill and intelligent passing rather than wasteful use of long balls.

Even his views on nutrition and sensible diets were cutting edge, but would not be fully digested on these shores until many years later.

Peter McParland was one of the young Villa players Hogan took along to observe Hungary handing out a footballing lesson to England 60 years ago and the coach made a lasting impression on the Ulsterman.

McParland claimed Hogan was “way ahead of his time” and revealed that even in his seventies the Lancashire-born trailblazer would be on the practice pitches demonstrating what he expected from players.

“Even at that age he could do anything with the ball except make it talk,” he recalled.

Ron Atkinson, too, a Villa trainee in the 50s, regards Hogan among the biggest influences on him, saying: “When Jimmy came he was revolutionary. He’d have you in the bit of the old car park at the back of Villa Park and say ‘I want you to play it with the inside of your right foot, outside of your right foot, now turn, come back on your left foot, inside outside’.

“Then he’d get you doing stepovers and little turns and twists on the ball. Everything you did was to make you comfortable with the ball.”

The final word goes to another of his prodigies, Houghton, who a few years after Hogan passed away aged 91 in the mid-1970s, was still in wonder at his mentor’s approach and pondering what Villa might have gone on to achieve had the Second World War not intervened.

“I have often blessed the day I met Jimmy Hogan, who taught me so much about the game and about myself,’’ he said.

‘His methods were simple, ‘the easier you make it, the better you will play it’ he used to say.

“I can hear him now, a stocky, ram-rod stiff, yet dignified man, pounding out his simple theories like ‘remember, when passing or kicking the ball, it travels at least twice as fast as a man can run.

‘Why bother to beat a man – unless you have to – when he can be beaten with an accurate pass?’

“He formulated what, to me, was the most successful Aston Villa team of my time, though we were robbed of our just rewards by the intervention of the Second World War, when I was convinced we were on the verge of enjoying a decade of success similar to the periods enjoyed by Manchester United, Leeds United and Liverpool.”

Online Chico Hamilton III

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Re: Jimmy Hogan
« Reply #1 on: March 08, 2018, 09:17:37 PM »
I had Norman Fox's book about Jimmy Hogan (worth a fortune now but I think I dropped mine in the bath).  A proper coach, years ahead of his time by all accounts.

Offline Pat McMahon

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Re: Jimmy Hogan
« Reply #2 on: March 08, 2018, 10:02:30 PM »
Great article - thanks for posting

 


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