'Big’ Sam Allardyce. England manager.
Yes really.
On the face of it, no-one should be too surprised. He’s an
Englishman who has managed in the Premier League for most of the last 15 years,
and – on paper – has done a pretty good job at most of the clubs he’s managed
at.
Most recently he got West Ham back up at the first attempt
and then consolidated their position in the Premier League, giving Slaven Bilic
their platform for his success last season. He then somehow saved Sunderland
from inevitable relegation last season, with an inspired signing of Jermaine
Defoe providing the firepower once he’d re-organised and patched up the
division’s worst-looking defence and turned them into clean sheet regulars.
His hugely successful stint at Bolton is perhaps drifting
into the memory banks but what he achieved there – especially when you look at
where they are now – was nothing short of miraculous, albeit one that set in
motion the start of the build-up of debt that has so crippled the club now. In
fact he almost certainly should have got the job in 2006 when Steve McClaren
was handed the reins and he has no budget to push for with England.
His time at Newcastle and Blackburn is viewed as being less successful,
with Newcastle fans in particular seemingly still reeling from that period, but
being sacked at both clubs only tells part of the story. On each occasion new owners – Mike Ashley at St.James’ Park
and the infamous Venky’s at Blackburn – had recently come to the club and, as
so often happens, wanted to stamp their own mark with their own hand-picked
manager.
Both clubs sacked him whilst they were just the wrong side
of the table’s mid-point, feeling they were going nowhere. They were though.
Both were relegated within 18 months of Allardyce leaving. Was he
over-achieving with both?
So what’s wrong with this appointment? Why have so many
reacted with such ferocity, suggesting the FA have lost their minds?
Well, it’s ‘Big Sam’.
Some are inevitably likening him to Mike Bassett, with a
partly-understandable, partly-unfair stereotyping him of an 80’s style English
manager. You know; big man up-front, big defenders, tough midfielders and
generally only score goals from set-pieces. That kinda thing.
And he certainly has a track record of a backs-to-the-wall,
attritional style of football. The consolidation pointed to above, with
Blackburn, Newcastle and West Ham, is often deemed insufficient by fans and
owners alike who get comfortable, want to press on and only realise what they’ve
got when it’s gone. And consolidation, of course, hasn’t led to a major trophy
win as a manager, something everyone seems very keen to point out about Sam.
But that belies his time at Bolton where he successfully
built teams around the likes of Jay-Jay Okocha and Youri Djorkaeff, allowing
them the platform to dazzle, create and entertain and reached not only the UEFA
Cup, as it was, by finishing sixth, but a League Cup final which they lost by
the odd goal.
He’s certainly a Marmite selection and the view of those in
support of him barely stretches beyond ‘he can’t do any worse’, but he is the
new gaffer and deserves at least the two year window, if not the four years
that the international game revolves around.
My own personal view is that England should have cast the
net wider. It seems as if it was an Englishman plus one or two options, but
when managers of the calibre and with the cvs of Hiddink, Wenger, Pellegrini,
Ranieri and Benitez have such strong links to the English game, you have to
assume one or two of them would have been tempted with the right offer.
But if you get too snooty about Allardyce being the chosen
on, then recall we’ve just been knocked out of one of the most average European
Championships there has ever been by Iceland. Remember we haven’t reached a
major final for 50 years and that even ‘doing a Wales’ and getting to the last
four of a major tournament was last achieved two decades ago, before Marcus
Rashford was even born.
Doubts will remain about his style of play and whether
England will be entertaining enough. My answer to that is pretty simple. Would
you rather keep clean sheets, nick games by the odd goal and win the European
Championships like Portugal have just done, or try to keep endless possession,
then badly fluff your lines when going forward before showing up immense
weaknesses in your organisation in defence, like England managed so adeptly
this summer?
Hodson’s idea of attacking, entertaining football was to play
any number of strikers regardless of whether they fitted into the team
structure or not, but all that did was leave us short on those able to defend
and create in the middle of the park.
Whatever the natural ridicule following the Iceland defeat,
you can’t say that Walker, Rose, Smalling and Cahill are worse players than
those who turned out for Iceland, Northern Ireland or Wales (with the possible
exception of Ashley Williams). Otherwise all their players would be playing
Champions League football and be plying their trade at clubs finishing in the
top five of the Premier League. They’re not, because individually they’re not
as good, yet were made to look light years in front of us at times.
You struggle to imagine an Allardyce side would have
conceded a goal from a long throw-in. There’s no way he’d have had Harry Kane
taking corners and I suspect the honest, hard-working Danny Drinkwater would
have been rewarded with a place in the squad over two midfielders with barely a
couple of games between them since the early Spring.
Would Andy Carroll have been a more viable option to throw
on when things did get desperate, someone to knock down and hold up those
60-yard passes from Rooney out of defence?
So what are we getting with the new England manager?
Organisation, set-piece expertise, both defensively and in attack (43% of
Sunderland’s goals last season were scored from set-pieces).
We’re certainly getting someone with a lot more character
than Roy Hodgson, and maybe that rubs off naturally. One accusation Hodgson
could never seemingly shake was that his dour demeanour filtered through to the
players who were left uninspired and short of ideas.
You won’t get that with Big Sam. There will be passion, hard
work and absolutely, definitely no giving up.
By far the worst worst element of England pathetic exit in
France was that with 20 minutes to go we just seemed to give up the ghost
without even a snivelling whimper of the quietest order.
Oh, and for those who say Allardyce will take us back to
‘the bad old days’ of long ball English hoofball. Have you really seen a worse
performance than the one against Iceland? How can it get worse than that?
One might argue we tried this with Keegan, getting someone
in with passion to inspire the players, but Allardyce is substantially more
capable than Keegan ever was tactically, hence his prolonged stay at the top of
the game.
You can manage on passion for a short while, but then you
get found out. The evidence from last season’s successful escape indicates
Allardyce has yet to be found out. But now he faces his biggest test in one of
the most high-profile jobs in football.
Will we win the World Cup under Sam? Probably not, but then
we haven’t won any of the last 12 either.
Have we got a better chance of going
further by being better organised, playing with good spirit and being a real
team? Of course we have.
What you can be sure of is that Big Sam Allardyce won’t
shirk this challenge, in fact he’ll positively relish every second of it.
He won’t give up and for that, at least, he deserves the
support of every English football fan.
The Exiled Robin
This is a fabulous blog and following it has been a delight, Thank you for doing the amazing work that you do here and please continue with it.
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