The best job in English football has gone to the only man left in the world who still believes it is.
At least Sam Allardyce properly wanted it. Really, really, really wanted it. It’s fair to say he was the only candidate interviewed already in possession of a St George’s flag beach towel.
On his unveiling as the new manager of the England national side, he looked like Augustus Gloop on being given free rein of Willy Wonka‘s chocolate factory. Wide of eye and mouth, he couldn’t have been happier had Phil Brown entered stage left dressed as an Oompa Loompa and declared himself his new assistant. Off camera, Eddie Howe was perfectly cast as Charlie, nervously unwrapping his single Wonka bar while asking when he could go home to Bournemouth.
Whatever stance you take on Allardyce‘s suitability for the position it was hard not to find his opening gambits endearing. There was nothing original or insightful about what he had to say; it was more about how he said it. Just watch the clip below.
Indeed, if you dissected his first soundbites in finite detail, it would probably raise the question of whether they had been penned by the same speechwriter employed by Kevin Keegan, Sven-Goran Eriksson, Steve McClaren, Fabio Capello, Roy Hodgson, Michelle Obama, and Melania Trump.
However, after the ghostly pallor of Hodgson‘s, “I don’t really know what I am doing here,” send-off, it was easy to warm to a beaming rhetoric of: “I know exactly what I’m doing here, and it’s about bloody time.”
Now the dust has settled a little on the appointment, it seems split opinion essentially boils down to two warring camps of thought: the pragmatists versus the dreamers. The two rarely get on.
In a blistering defrocking of the England job, the Telegraph’s Paul Hayward has called for it to be rid of its “sacred calling” status:
Allardyce‘s appointment marks a debunking of the England job – a downgrading, which is no bad thing, and no insult to ‘Big Sam’ himself.
The job needed stripping of its mythical status, its ludicrous Messiah glow. The best job in football? What a parody.
Critics of the Football Association’s decision will be a mixture of dreamers who think England need more sophistication and stereotypers who believe Allardyce is a throwback to England’s industrial heritage, complete with bluff manner and long-ball cv. This over-estimates the England job and under-estimates Allardyce.
Above all Allardyce will recognise weakness in players and capitalise on individual strength. He will cultivate a winning mentality and expel the half-hearted.
England need to come down from their mountain. Allardyce will start by attacking their self-regard.
Many have adopted Hayward’s position. Like turning up at a holiday villa that looks nothing like the photos in the brochure, initial dismay and anger often dissipates into weary resignation when the alternatives come into focus. Having to find substitute accommodation with two screaming kids in tow when you don’t speak the language sounds about as much fun as having Steve Bruce as England manager.
As the American writer Charles Bukowski once said: “Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.”
It’s worth noting on June 28, when part of a panel of Telegraph sports writers asked to pick who they would want as England’s next manager, Hayward plumped for Howe, while mentioning Gareth Southgate, Alan Shearer and Brendan Rodgers. It’s quite the endorsement he has written for Allardyce given he didn‘t even make his shortlist; it looks like everyone is coming down from a mountain.
For a man who often laments his luck in life, Allardyce‘s timing has been spot on.
After keeping Sunderland in the Premier League last season having taken over a club in a parlous state, with just three points from eight matches, his stock has rarely been higher. If you flip it, and say he had 30 matches, and a January transfer window in which he was heavily backed, to turn around a five-point deficit on fourth from bottom, it doesn’t sound quite so impressive.
Elsewhere, his English brethren have endured troubled times. Garry Monk lost his job at Swansea City, Gary Neville likewise at Valencia (while of course being part of England’s disastrous Euro 2016 campaign), Southgate‘s under-21 side fared no better a year earlier in their equivalent Euros, while Tim Sherwood continued being Tim Sherwood.
The Premier League’s non-English but as close to being English as you’re going to get options in Roberto Martinez and Rodgers, both had disastrous campaigns culminating in a double sacking on Merseyside. Sean Dyche continues to look the real deal at Burnley, but we’ll know more about his credentials after his second crack at the Premier League this season.
The options in terms of homegrown coaches were limited, to say the least. No English manager has won the Premier League. Only one has Champions League experience, and it’s difficult to see Keegan fancying another stab at the England job. Englishmen occupy four of 98 managerial positions across Europe’s top five leagues, all in the Premier League.
The lovechild of B. A. Baracus and Dennis Bergkamp travels better than English coaches abroad.
Allardyce would likely point out, quite fairly, other managers being crap at their jobs isn’t his fault.
Prior to Allardyce‘s appointment, Arsene Wenger said he wouldn’t rule himself out of managing England in the same way he might say he wouldn’t rule himself out of forming a trip-hop group with Shaun Ryder, before effectively ruling himself out by turning his phone off all summer. No wonder Arsenal signings have been thin on the ground.
The success of Portugal in France under Fernando Santos’ unapologetically pragmatic regime has worked in the former Sunderland manager’s favour too. The zeitgeist in the year of the underdog, of first Leicester City and then Portugal, has called for a no-nonsense coach who can pull a disparate group together to make the sum of its parts greater than the whole. Cue Allardyce riding into shot on a white donkey horse.
Much was made of Santos’ unassuming billing prior to the Euros, but it’s worth remembering his resume includes spells at each of Portugal’s top three clubs, with his stint at FC Porto seeing him win five titles. Prior to taking the Portugal job he managed the Greek national side, helping them to the quarter-finals of Euro 2012, and then into the knockout stages of a World Cup for the first time in their history two years later.
Whisper it quietly, for pragmatists often have Stasi-like tendencies, but didn’t Allardyce get hounded out of his two most high-profile positions? He is rightly proud of the fact he has left every single club he has managed in a higher position than he inherited, but is it not a concern that Newcastle United and West Ham United supporters both found his brand of football insufferable?
English football may—as Hayward points out—be on its knees, but even Oliver Twist had the temerity to ask for a little more than gruel. There’s an argument to say someone isn’t necessarily a head-in-the-sky purist just because they’re not sure what the question is when Allardyce is the answer.
It’s been a while since I sat down for a Super Sunday binge without knowing the fixtures, and thought, “great, absolutely love a game involving an Allardyce side” upon finding out.
On the perceived lack of aesthetic sophistication his sides usually display, he less has a chip on his shoulder than a chip shop (via the Guardian): “The lingering long-ball s–t, the old style, all that rubbish that’s never been me and never been a part of what I am.”
At the start of his career, he worked under John Beck as a youth-team coach at Preston North End. In his book Big Sam: My Autobiography, he claims it was hard “defending the indefensible”, when charged with instilling in his young players the tactics of one of English football’s originators, and crudest practitioners, of the long-ball game he is often derided for using himself.
If Allardyce‘s West Ham side played football from the 19th century, according to Jose Mourinho, Beck’s teams were more 14th century.
The Football Association’s much-feted England DNA, which is a kind of style sheet for the national game drawn up by director of elite development Dan Ashworth, with Southgate also heavily involved, identifies a specific playing philosophy to be incorporated at all age groups, per the Evening Standard: “England teams aim to dominate possession intelligently.”
Did I mention Beck, nicknamed Dracula because he sucked the life out of football, is currently employed at St George’s Park, entrusted with graduating the next generation of coaches through their UEFA B-level badges. Prior to his passing, Ronnie Biggs used to collect the players’ subs.
And here’s Allardyce on possession football, per the Mirror: “All this tippy-tappy stuff is all a load of b——s.
“Getting the ball into the opposition’s box as quickly as you can with quality and getting it forward and in behind the opposition is definitely the best way forward.”
That’s not to say either philosophy is intrinsically right or wrong (England had plenty of the ball in France but didn‘t have a clue what to do with it), just an eyebrow raised at the FA’s decision to appoint a coach whose general principles, about how the game should be played, are polar opposites to those espoused in the exhaustive long-term plan they have put in place.
It’s like appointing a Foreign Secretary with a penance for offending the rest of the world. 2016 has been an odd year.
The argument is it doesn’t really matter what Allardyce‘s preferred style is, as the England job is all about the challenge of tournament football, and how to find the right blend of players to get the required results over a month of matches. Safeguarding the future of English football should not be the primary concern of the England manager.
Not everyone is convinced, with The Independent‘s Matthew Norman particularly cutting in his assessment of the FA’s short-sightedness: “The point to choosing Allardyce—a braggartly dullard who mistakes his coma-inducing competence for scandalously overlooked genius—is not to challenge for trophies. The only imaginable purpose to hiring him is to avoid future humiliation on the Icelandic template.”
Allardyce‘s stance has always been he plays the hand he has been dealt. If his players aren’t oil paintings, he isn’t going to enter them in beauty contests. His sides have never been as expansive as, for example, Martinez’s were at Everton, but neither have they been as porous as a paper sieve. He’s never been relegated either.
There’s a strong argument to say Allardyce is a better manager than Martinez, but in terms of style, it’s often a case of the lady doth protest too much whenever the subject is raised in his earshot.
“I’m not suited to Bolton or Blackburn, I would be more suited to Inter Milan or Real Madrid,” he once claimed, per the Guardian.
“It wouldn’t be a problem to me to go and manage those clubs because I would win the double or the league every time.”
Give him a twig and a piece of string, and he’d probably catch Jaws. Louis Armstrong blew his own trumpet less. Even giving Allardyce a little grace for the fact many of his achievements haven’t always been met with the respect they deserve (he did a remarkable job at Bolton), his bigger boasts don’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny.
In Big Sam, he is scathing about West Ham supporters on leaving the club. Despite getting them promoted from the Championship via the play-offs in his first season in east London, and then achieving more than respectable 10th-, 13th- and 12th-place finishes; Allardyce was never a popular figure. You don’t have to be Russell Grant to realise something is afoot when your own fans boo when you’re winning.
Allardyce wrote:
As soon as I was appointed West Ham manager in 2011 the big debate was whether I would follow the ‘West Ham way’, which nobody could define but, whatever it was, I apparently didn‘t play it.
None of the players would admit it, but they used to sit in the dressing room at half-time going: ‘Listen to them, never f***ing happy, slaughtering us all the time.’
The fans won’t turn up if West Ham are playing fantasy football and losing 5-3 every week. Slaven Bilic is the new man in the hotseat and good luck to him. He will need it.
He didn‘t. In his first campaign at the Boleyn Ground a seventh-place finish meant Slaven Bilic improved West Ham by five places and 15 points on Allardyce‘s final season in charge. With the same resources, the Croatian had West Ham playing infinitely better football and the fans, never f—–g happy, were eating out of the palm of his hand.
If Allardyce really is the master at getting the best out of players, and he’s going to transform the current crop of world-class English bottlers into world-class footballers, how come Bilic has proved significantly better at it at West Ham?
It’s almost as if Bilic, who has experience of international management with Croatia, is immensely personable and plays attractive football, might have been worth an approach.
Allardyce lasted just 24 matches at Newcastle. He was axed in January 2008 after winning only two of his final 13 games at the helm.
That’s not to say Allardyce isn’t a decent manager. He’s a good club manager, very good perhaps, and probably the best English manager. With 467 Premier League matches under his belt, he knows English football and its top-flight players inside out. His appointment isn’t laughable as some have suggested, it’s just not inspired either. Far from it.
Like every England appointment, it’s a reaction to the last one. Capello was the iron fist after McClaren‘s velvet glove stoked the egos of “Stevie” Gerrard and Co., but not the fire in their bellies. Capello was far too foreign, so in came the quintessential English gent Hodgson. When he spent most of the Euros looking as though he couldn’t remember whether he had left the iron on in the hotel, the FA called on Allardyce, presumably because he doesn’t bother ironing anything.
With a healthy budget for a two-year tenure, it’s not as though the FA were going to prospective candidates cap in hand. A £7 million salary for what is effectively a part-time position doesn’t seem a bad gig. Even if Sir Bobby Robson once aid of his time in the job, per the Irish Independent: “The first two years can be a lonely, terrifying nightmare.” Bet that quote wasn’t on the job spec.
The FA chief executive and former biscuit overlord Martin Glenn described Allardyce as the “ideal candidate” at Friday’s presentation, per the Guardian. Presumably in his old job he used to consider the plain old digestive the ideal biscuit, in comparison to its more ostentatious chocolate-covered counterpart.
In his defence, it is not just in England that coaching the national side has long since ceased to be the pinnacle of a manager’s career. It’s hard to think of an international heavyweight with its nation’s best manager presently at the helm.
Diego Maradona has said he is willing to work for free to have another crack at the vacant Argentina job. Diego Simeone wouldn’t be tempted out of club football for the role if they gave him the keys to every bank vault in Argentina.
Since the end of the European Championship, the respective appointments of Giampiero Ventura and Julen Lopetegui as Italy and Spain’s new managers has brought into sharp focus where international football figures in the pecking order.
Ventura did a good job in his last role as Torino coach, but at the age of 68, it was arguably the biggest job of his career, other than a single season at Napoli. Like Allardyce, he has never won a trophy.
Lopetegui at least has a background in international football having led Spain’s under-21 side to a European Championship win in 2013. He may already have worked with senior internationals David De Gea, Marc Bartra, Thiago, Koke, Isco, and Alvaro Morata, among others, but given he was strongly linked to both Wolverhampton Wanderers and Nottingham Forest over the summer after a less successful stint at Porto (he was sacked after failing to win any trophies in two years, despite being handed the club’s biggest-ever budget), it’s still quite the upgrade.
You could say the same about Allardyce and England too.
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