“The start of a brand new era”, read a headline on Liverpool’s official website this week. It was for a story announcing “day one” of the club’s “partnership” with Standard Chartered Bank. In truth, however, it could have been a banner announcing the general mood of Kopites right now. A brand new era indeed, one where Liverpool’s top players want out and there appears no hope of the team winning a major trophy in the short or long-term. This must be what being an Evertonian feels like.

In the shimmering sunlight of July’s first day, though, came some hope. He is 62-years-old, cannot pronounce his ‘r’s’ and wears his trousers at an almost alarmingly high level, but Roy Hodgson may just be the man to lead our club out of the darkness.

Like most Reds, I slid into a pit of sadness on the day it was announced that Rafael Benítez was leaving Anfield and like a love-shorn soul, I reached out for Kenny Dalglish to come in and replace our once-mighty Spanish manager. After all, If you can’t have one great love then why not have another?

But a rebound relationship is not what we need right now. Kenny would have given us all a short-term high, but a man who has not managed a club in over 10 years is hardly the ideal figurehead at this most precarious of times. Kenny certainly has his virtues – the 59-year-old is an intelligent man with four league titles to his name – but a decade is a long-time to have been away from the frontline, even for the greatest.

Of the remaining candidates to take over from Rafa there were the flashy but unrealistic – Louis Van Gaal, Guus Hiddink and, at one stage, José Mourinho – and the downright uninspiring – Martin O’Neill, Manuel Pellegrini and, God forbid, Mark Hughes. Some would say that Hodgson fits comfortably in the second category, but that would be to deny our usually shambolic board its one moment of wisdom.

While hardly earth-shattering, Hodgson’s managerial record since he took up his first post in 1976 is as impressive as it is varied. He has won league titles in Sweden, with Halmstad Orebro and Malmo, and in Denmark, with FC Copenhagen, as well as leading Internazionale to the Uefa Cup final and third place in Serie A with a team that maintained a huge reputation but had been, prior to his arrival, struggling badly. Sound familiar?

There has been failures too – Hodgson has been sacked by Bristol City, Blackburn, and as manager of the United Arab Emirates – but as his near miraculous  spell in charge of Fulham proves, he is by no means a busted flush.

Cynics claim Hodgson, who also led Switzerland to respectability at the 1994 World Cup, has only been brought in because he is willing to work with a restricted transfer budget, but, again, this is a positive. Do Liverpool really want a manager who demands millions upon millions to spend on players, even during financially fruitful times? Surely it is better to have someone who can find a gem from nowhere. Anyone in doubt of that should have a chat with Arsenal supporters and see how much pleasure they have taken from seeing relative unknowns such as Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit, Nicolas Anelka, Thierry Henry and Cesc Fábregas flourish in their colours.

The fact anyway is that the Liverpool manager does not have a stack of cash to spend on players, with the most optimistic estimate of our summer transfer budget reaching no further than £15m. Hodgson can cope with that – in his first six months at Fulham he spent about that much on new recruits, with the bulk of them (Brede Hangeland, Erik Nevland, Mark Schwarzer, Zoltan Gera, Bobby Zamora and John Pantsil) proving reasonable to considerable successes.

What is for sure is that Hodgson is the most experienced manager Liverpool has ever employed and like that great trio of our past; Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan, maintains a grounded yet ambitious demeanour. It was also impressive to hear Hodgson, on the day of his appointment, eulogise about the style in which we played during our heyday. So his team may not get close to matching the success of the 70s and 80s, but there is at least the hope it will attempt to replicate the swagger of that time.

The biggest concern facing our new manager is a severe threat to the status quo. It seems more than likely that at least one of Javier Mascherano, Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres will leave Liverpool this summer with the odds on all three departing worryingly short. Mascherano seems a given – he has begun learning Italian while with the Argentina World Cup squad ahead of a heavily rumoured move to Rafa’s Internazionale, but gut instinct says the other two could be persuaded to stay. Hodgson will certainly hope so and it is his primary objective to tell our No8 and No9 that Anfield remains a haven of hope, a venue where the loftiest of dreams can still be realised.

Even with Gerrard and Torres, there is no guarantee Hodgson will be a success at Liverpool. It is difficult for any manager to walk in the path cultivated by Shanks at the best of times, let alone during this epoch of misery created by Hicks and Gillette. All we know for sure is that the club have appointed an experienced, intelligent, humble and recently successful man to be our new manager and as much as many of us wanted Dalglish, that was surely the right move to make.

The King is alive, but long live Red Roy.

Sachin Nakrani