Roy Hodgson: England players didn’t understand me

The 69-year-old, who left his post in the summer after England’s embarrassing Euro 2016 exit at the hands of minnows Iceland, has revealed he was forced into making players repeat instructions back to him to ensure they understood their job.

England’s training sessions would often be filmed and coaches would hold meetings with players, but Hodgson admitted that, despite these measures, certain players could not grasp what he wanted from them.

"One of the things I've learned in the last two years was overestimating players' understanding of exactly what you want," Hodgson told UEFA coaching magazine The Technician. "You have to make certain that they themselves take ownership of the situation.

"In the last couple of years with England, we filmed the training sessions, we filmed the games in wide angle, and we started having meetings in smaller groups.

"The goalkeepers and the defenders. The midfield players and the attackers. Sometimes defenders and midfield players. Sometimes midfield players and attackers. We went through things but we got them to tell us back what we had been telling them."

Hodgson attempted to drill into players that they had to take responsibility for their actions on the training pitch and in a match, and that they would only learn from mistakes by looking back at them retrospectively.

"We will work on it in training but then I want the player in the unit meeting, when he sees fit, to say: 'I should have gone out there, I should have gone quicker there'.

"Or 'I've gone too fast. I should have slowed down there. I've gone so quickly that the guy's gone past me before I can hold him up with the ball'. That type of thing. We got the players to take ownership."