Roy Hodgson has looked back on his time at Fulham, the same club Marco Silva still calls a fortress to highlight the meaning of the match that awaits Crystal Palace against Rayo Vallecano in the Conference League final on Wednesday in Leipzig.
·‘The Fulham fans still to this day remind me of the final’
The 78-year-old, who had two spells spanning six different seasons at his boyhood club Palace, also guided another club to success in a different way earlier in his managerial career. Hodgson oversaw the Cottagers between 2007 and 2010, taking the team to the Europa League final, mirroring what Palace is now achieving in continental football in his last season by beating Roma, Wolfsburg, Shakhtar Donetsk and Juventus. A Diego Forlan inspired Atletico Madrid defeated them at the final hurdle, and Hodgson hopes the story is different for Palace.
“We had a very small squad – we weren't geared at Fulham for that. My job at Fulham when I got to the club in 2008 was to avoid relegation, which we did on the final day of the season with an away win at Portsmouth .
“We did our best to improve the team, but there was not the amount of money to spend that would have immediately made us stronger, so we were working with players that we knew – one or two I knew from Norway, and players like Zoltan Gera and Damien Duff.
“I think if you're going to go into European football, you've got to be very fortunate to have enough players to be able to rest them on a fairly regular basis, because it certainly affected us in the matches we had to play on the Sunday after the Thursday.
“We had a very, very tough competition – we played Roma in the group stages [drawing 1-1 at home], and Basel who hadn’t lost at home [ Fulham won 3-2 in Switzerland]. We played Shakhtar, who had a multi-talented group of Brazilians, some of whom went on to be big players in England: Fernandinho and Willian , to name just two.
“It was a really tough run to the Final. But it was a wonderful spell, and meeting Atletico in the Final, they had a number of important players and big players – but we came close. It was very good for the club, just as Palace's run in the Conference League has been very good for the club as well.
“The Fulham fans still to this day remind me of the final despite the fact we lost it in Hamburg against Atletico. It's going to be very much the same for Crystal Palace and the Palace fans.
“They're going to be talking about reaching the Conference League Final for years to come, especially on the back of winning a major trophy.”