The unpretending lord

Craven Cottage

Seeing football game on Craven Cottage, Fulham FC stadium, look like a travel to see history.A chronicle to the modesty past time.It's a building with full of iconic style where another side of building  is still vailing to surroundings.

The iconic style can be described on the inappropriate of building's corner,narrow hallway,classic gateway, and even in particular part, the spectator viewing is blocked by building's pillars.Craven Cottage's capacity is hard to be enlarged just because several part of stadium is still preserved.

Usually, the EPL clubs have their stadium on bussiness or semi-industrial area, but Fulham haven't.Craven Cottage is located in banks of the River Thames and in the edge of huge park, where used to be royal hunting area.

On the left and right onto Craven Cottage is the old trees with lush leaves and grass are neatly trimmed.If the weather is nice, groups of old men with all whites outfit look relaxed playing lawn bowling or perhaps we can find people play tennis on grass.

Roy Hodgson

Walking onto Craven Cottage seem like we're enjoying tranquility of past time in the middle of London's traffic.And how exactly that ex-Fulham manager was a modest old man named Roy Hodgson.He's like a personification of Craven Cottage and surroundings.If watching football on Craven Cottage as physically brought into past time, then Hodgson brings back values of the past to football game.

When Fulham beat Hamburg in Europa League semifinal last season, he immediately went to the players and reminding foster children to be grateful, thanking supporters, respect for opponents, and not be excessive.He also told them to respect for opponent fans.

Hodgson's behaviour seems like not to be extraordinary for us, but we have to realize that hard to find behaviour like that in recent football culture.We know that high pressure, especially on big clubs, makes everybody forget of the values ​​inherent in sports, and Hodgson bring good behaviour of the past.

And  no wonder if multilanguange - fluet in Italian,german,Swedish,French,Norwegian,Finnish,and Dannish- man is becoming Brittish and fans most favourite coach. In fact, he was honoured as 2010 English best manager  as his success to bring Fulham to first european competition final in 120 years club history.While european manager call him friendly manager, and if referee may choose their favourite manager, they would choose Hodgson because of he rare to criticize referee's performance.

Indeed, he was not as successful as the world's top manager (even though people always remember when he took Switzerland to the last 16 World Cup 1994) and because of his age-63years old- he may not have much chance to be registered himself as a world-class top managers.But for Fulham fans, Roy Hodgson is a lord, the unpretending lord, who brought a mediocre club into european club competition final.