FIREMAN SAM WILL NEED A BIG HOSE!
‘SAM ALLARDYCE is a man with a proven Premier League pedigree,’ announced West Bromwich Albion’s sporting director Luke Dowling. ‘We believe, and more importantly Sam believes, that we have a group of players with the quality needed to give the club its best chance of Premier League survival.’ Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Dowling, not Allardyce. He is, after all, responsible for those players. So if West Brom didn’t have a squad to stay up, it would reflect rather poorly on him. Hence the arrival of Allardyce to the standard fanfare of sirens and screams. For if we are talking proven Premier League pedigree, Allardyce’s line boss does not have one. Dowling arrived at Watford mid-season 2014-15 in the Championship and went up with them. He then did two seasons in the Premier League, 2015-16 and 2016-17, before leaving by mutual consent. He seems to have performed well. Yet in 2019 when Steve Parish, chairman of Crystal Palace, said Watford’s recruitment was the smartest in the Premier League, he specifically named owner Gino Pozzo’s knowledge of the European market, not any director of football. From Watford, after a gap of six months, Dowling turned up at Nottingham Forest, also in the Championship, and on to West Bromwich in September. So his Premier League pedigree is two full seasons, finishing 13th and 17th. And, yes, West Brom would settle for either right now and Allardyce would collect his handsome bonus. Yet using the appointment to endorse the club’s policy post-promotion is disingenuous at best. The budget Slaven Bilic was given for this season was wholly inadequate for the task. It was, by Dowling’s admission, somewhere near the figure spent by Norwich 12 months previously — to be placed in the bottom six of 560 teams
that have completed a Premier League season. Had West Brom travelled the same path, the buck may have stopped with Dowling. No wonder he heralded the arrival of Fireman Sam.