Euro 2012: Halmstads legend coached by Roy Hodgson admits divided loyalties when England take on Sweden Hodgson, who never played league football, had few credentials and less experience. But he had come through the coaching coarse run by the FA's forward-thinking technical director Allen Wade. And he had no shortage of ideas. "Before Roy, trainers in Sweden would put out the balls and tell you to run, run, run," said Selander. Roy was different. He would do positional drills all the time. In everything he did, there was a purpose. We thought 'This is interesting', and of course the new system worked much better than before. We had very ordinary guys in the backline, but Roy fixed them. Selander was Halmstad's captain at the time, a playmaking midfielder with more than 30 international caps. At 33, he was five years older than his new coach, and the other players looked to him for guidance. Had he rejected the Hodgson method - which replaced the traditional Swedish "libero" system with a flat back four, zonal marking and a high offside line - then the team would have collapsed. Instead they rallied spectacularly, going from relegation candidates to champions of the Allsvenskan (or Swedish first division) in that very first season. "Mr Hodgson loved Hans," remembers Mats Jingblad, now Halmstad's youth-team coach, but then a young striker who was just making his way into the team. I remember at one training session, he wanted Hans to show us how to play a ball up to the front players, and Hans missed. 'Ah, come on Hans', he said, so Hans played it again - perfectly this time. Mr Hodgson rubbed his hands together and said 'See? He never misses twice.' It wasn't all tennis and trophies, though. After a couple of seasons, the players were growing weary of their repetitive training sessions, which occupied at least two-and-a-half hours per night. Hodgson would run through the same drills again and again in a process he described as "positive brainwashing." The rigidity of Halmstad's gameplan became such a talking point that the Swedish comedians Hasse & Tage satirised it in a famous sketch. Their version of Hodgson explained that "We have our special techniques at Halmstad, that's why we always win. These other teams they have different systems, 4-4-2 and 2-4-4. Ours is 5-4-3-8-9-6-8-1 ... It's the number for Lisa's massage parlour. At the start of the 1978 season, Selander gave Hodgson an ultimatum. I said 'I am finished, I don't play any more if you want to train this way'. All the players were working eight hours a day in their jobs. I was working on the farm but most of the guys were teachers and students. We wanted to have some fun on the pitch when we were training. It was a big thing for Roy. At first he wasn't happy. But then we started to play more games and competitions in training. The only thing was that Roy didn't want to stop until his team had won. I know he didn't have a big career as a player but he had a very good left foot. After a couple of mid-table seasons, Halmstad promptly returned to the top of the Allsvenskan in 1979, with a team that is still remembered as the finest in their history. Hodgson may have inherited a motley bunch of part-timers, but he transformed them into a finely-honed machine - an achievement he later described as a "water into wine job." It is a trick he is now trying to repeat with England at Euro 2012. Thanks to Ola Nilsson of Dagens Nyheter for his translation of Hasse & Tage