The curious case of the deluded Samuel Allardyce....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/fo...ve-improved-every-club-I-have-worked-for.html

Which Premier League manager, the Portuguese was asked by an enterprising soul, would he least like to fight? “Big Sam,” he replied playfully, miming the image of a neck being broken. “He would kill me!”
The gentleman in question smiles thinly at the recollection. One senses he does not take kindly to this caricature as a Neanderthal belligerent, whose intimidating presence has led to his depiction more than once as the technical area’s answer to Meat Loaf.

“It’s always about the way you look, and you can’t help that, can you?” he counters. “Straight away it says to people what you must be old school, a dirty centre-half, and all that rubbish.”
Clearly, he in is the mood to shatter preconceptions. For in his second season at West Ham, Allardyce in claret-and-blue guise is a different beast, mellower and far more thoughtful than might be supposed from his thunderous touchline expressions.

At 58, after more than a decade spent managing in the Lancashire mill towns of Bolton and Blackburn, he finds that the London life suits him. He and wife, Lynn, rent an apartment in Canary Wharf and are besieged with invitations to soirées across the capital. Here is no provincial dinosaur, but a would-be metropolitan aesthete.

“We just saw the modern version of Jesus Christ Superstar at the O2,” he says. “Lynn had watched the whole Andrew Lloyd Webber series, so that was a fantastic evening.
"The biggest issue about moving to London was whether my wife decided, ‘Do I like this or don’t I?’ If she had concerns about living here, we would have headed out to the suburbs, to somewhere with a garage, a garden and a driveway – not with the 95,000 people who trundle out of Canary Wharf at 5pm every day.

"It’s our first time living in a flat, but the transition was almost instant. I can go back there and put the job to one side. You learn to do that as you get older.”
This dual existence, Allardyce explains, is a trick he absorbed from his great friend Sir Alex Ferguson. “When I was younger I asked him, ‘At what stage did you realise you were going to go on so long?’
"He told me, ‘I realised I had to change my life. Football had just completely overtaken it’. So he has other areas now, such as horseracing. Plus, he’s a very keen collector of fine wines.
“Taking yourself away from football keeps you sane and, ultimately, makes you do the job better. Now I’ll go away during an international break, to the Caribbean or wherever the sun’s shining.
"Brian Clough used to go away every January and leave the team to Peter Taylor. There is no book on management that states, ‘If you follow this way, you will be successful’. You need to find your own way.”
Allardyce is still emphatically his own man, even if this has not always worked to his advantage.

Tomorrow brings a potentially painful return to Newcastle United, where he was fired in January 2008 in what he then described as a “shock”.
The club, after all, stood a respectable 11th in the table at the time. Almost five years on, he initially shrugs off his dismissal as “right club, wrong time”, but the memories of St James’ Park soon stir him to issue a powerful defence of his record.
“Ask the people who worked with me,” he says. “I evolved the type of football that they liked. The players who worked with me enjoyed the journey that we took.
"Every club of mine finished in a better position when I left than when I took over. The yardstick of a manager’s success tends to be, ‘What have you won?’ You can’t measure mine like that.
“Each club, whether it was Limerick, Blackpool, Notts County, Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn or West Ham, I improved. It’s not me blowing my trumpet, it’s a fact. Look at it another way. Every one of my former clubs has been relegated since. Is that a better measurement?”

It is difficult to deny Allardyce these self-justifications but tempting to wonder, given his equally harsh sacking by Blackburn Rovers in December 2010 – a decision condemned by Ferguson as “absolutely ridiculous” – whether his confidence has taken a hit.
“No, because I didn’t deserve to be sacked from either of those positions,” he argues. “But it does harm your career. Clearly West Ham are a bigger and better club than Blackburn Rovers, but I had to take them while they were still in the Championship.”
For Allardyce, one of the top flight’s hardiest perennials, it was the type of move he might once have perceived as an indignity.
“When I lost my job at Newcastle, I remember a few press lads asking, ‘Are you going to drop down to come back up again?’
"I said, ‘Am I what? I’m one of the longest-serving Premier League managers around and you’re saying I should drop down to the Championship? Have you seen my CV?’ It shows you how people forget in this game and how, over time, they can lose the reality of what you have done.”

The enforced adaptation to a life beyond football was not easy for Allardyce, out of work for 11 months after Newcastle cut him adrift. He describes the period of exile starkly, likening it to an addict forced to ‘go cold turkey’.
“All these decision-making processes weren’t there any more,” he reflects. “You go through withdrawal symptoms at first. You have got to get over the addiction.
"The addiction is that as a manager, you’re making 20, 30 decisions a day. They might only be small ones but you still make them. Every little detail has to be taken care of. Then all of a sudden, you disappear, and after the burst of 1,000 calls to sympathise, the only decision you have got to make is whether to have cornflakes or porridge for breakfast.”
He makes it sound like a bereavement – which, for a man so helplessly wedded to his trade, it must have been. “Lynn asked, ‘What shall we do?’
“‘Let’s go abroad’, I said. When I returned, things began to become better, because I could pick my grandchildren up from school and watch them play football. I had all this family time that helped you overcome. Then, about eight months in, I started having the agitated feeling, thinking, ‘It’s time to go back. I want to get back in the pressure pot again’.”

Allardyce radiates an enthusiasm for his work at West Ham, ranking the play-off triumph over Blackpool at Wembley as one of his proudest moments, but he harbours a profound worry about the English game he adores.
“It’s a very negative environment, ours,” he mutters at one point. He highlights the alarming rate of turnover among young managers in the lower divisions and the fact that both Peter Reid and Bryan Robson, two of his closest associates, are still frozen out of front-line management.
Most of all, though, he laments football’s short-sightedness. As a long-time connoisseur of sports science, Allardyce makes an impassioned case for his sport to be treated more cerebrally and for there to be an American-style college system of identifying the finest young talent.

“Football is a far too short-term business,” he claims. “Everything’s about today, tomorrow and the next game. There’s nothing about two, three, five years’ time, and it’s harmful.
“We are losing our identity as a football nation that develops its own players. We are just turning into an attraction for those developed everywhere else to come and play in the best league in the world.
"The sad thing is that we have some of the best universities in the world, but lack the sporting set-up to run alongside them. So it’s left to us in football, when the sport should be on the same level as a master’s degree. It’s treated as a pastime, rather than as a part of the curriculum.”

Warming to his theme, he invokes the US example. “If you’re the best American football player, you win the best scholarship or go to the right school. Look at France, too. Nicolas Anelka is a great footballer, but he wasn’t allowed to stay at Clairefontaine unless he passed his exams.
"I’m a believer that you live to the level of your education. We don’t do that here, which is a great shame. We just farm it out to football and that’s why, until we’re on a more even keel, we won’t create the level of top players that we need.”

Our time, alas, is up and Allardyce, sweeping past David Gold’s helicopter parked outside, must repair to his office. The figure characterised so widely as a bruiser has emerged instead as an unlikely purist and pedagogue. One cannot help but conclude that Mourinho had him wrong.

 

this bloke needs to be sent to a mental home.

 

His view on his management skills aside, it's a great article thanks for sharing it.

 

How can you argue that you've improved all of your clubs and then say "they've all been relegated since"?

I don't think his signings were an outright failure for us, but some took time to settle (Barton, Enrique). Beye was great, Viduka and Abdouleye Faye did a job and lets not dwell on Smith, Cacapa and Amdi Faye. It's just that he had us playing terrible football and there was a change of owner. To an extent he was a victim of circumstances but his opinion of himself and his abilities doesn't match 'reality'. He is a good manager, i just wouldn't pay to watch any of his teams play.

 

He makes a lot of sense and is very forward thinking, incredibly up himself though.

Whilst I won't knock his managerial achievements (though his playing style with us was tosh), I think his PR skills are donk but that he'd make a fantastic 'director of football' somewhere.

I admire his footballing brain but not his stubborness and failure to admit mistakes. A position where we don't have to see or hear of him would be best all round.

 

I think he has an excellent record against us and the way we are playing I'm saying the draw is the more likely result so lets wait and see before taking the piss out of him.

 

Still struggle to blame him for his time here. He should never have been appointed. As a club with an ethos of carpet football you'd have to question the sanity of a man who appoints a long ball merchant. He doesn't like the tag of course but there is no getting away from it! I don't think I've been more depressed than when he was in charge, Saturday afternoons became a chore for the first time. Watching Owen and Martins having 60 yard bombs launched at them was just purely moronic.

On a personal level he is very dislikeable and obviously deluded. He has become a bit of a comedic figure with his delusions of grandeur. He can't work out why the top clubs don't come calling. They wouldn't insult their fans! He refuses to accept he has ever done a bad job and claims he has improved every club. The clubs records after he left suggest the legacy left was far from glorious. He saddled us with several albatrosses that contributed to dragging the club on a downward spiral.

Every manager is entitled to play the game how they choose. Personally I find the likes of Fat Sham and Pulis style just plain wrong because I don't think football should be played on percentages. Entertainment should always come first with a paying public. However they are entitled to do their own thing like others in the past like Graham Taylor or Dave Bassett. Personally I'd rather watch us play football in league 1 properly than that kind of PL football.

 

Amdy Faye was a Souness signing, not an Allardyce one. They're both total dickheads though so it's easy to get confused.

 

Marvo

He and wife, Lynn, rent an apartment in Canary Wharf and are besieged with invitations to soirées across the capital. Here is no provincial dinosaur, but a would-be metropolitan aesthete.


This line sleighed (time of year joke, oh yeah!) me!

 

Oh man, you just reminded me of how much I miss Oba (no, not Ober)

He would've flourished these few years if he had been here. Now before you guys go calling him a money-grabber, he had performed and clubs wanted to take him, and we were relegated and had to sell some players, hence players like Alan Smith nobody wanted, same as Xisco(till now), etc...
Think having Ba, Shola, Martins, Cisse would've given us all the weapons to dominate up front.

No comments on Micky though