How Big Sam became man for England

A footballing life spent proving the doubters wrong has led to the chance he craved

MORRISONS’ supermarket car park, Hartlepool, 10 o’clock, Thursday night: had he not slipped off an hour earlier to start his new job and his new life, Sam Allardyce would have recognised the scene.

Hartlepool United players were returning to their cars, parked here because there is not enough room at their Victoria Park ground. Hartlepool is real-world, lowerleague football where pressures and resources are different.

Allardyce would understand what that means to players and clubs. This, after all, is where he comes from. There are some who think this is where Sam Allardyce belongs. Basement Sam.

A small part of him may even have agreed — the part that remembered playing semi-pro for Dudley Town aged 14, or earning £60 a week at Bolton Wanderers and fretting about the mortgage.

A larger part of him will also have understood the perception. As he said in May: ‘You can’t fight the label in football.’

But not now, surely. If Allardyce felt like he had been fighting labels all his career — as player and manager — at 61 he can reflect today that he has fought the label and won. The boy who suffered at school due to undiagnosed dyslexia, who failed his England schoolboys trial, who was mocked by teammates at Bolton refusing to pass to him, who was sacked by Blackpool while the chairman was in prison and whose style was described as ‘19th century’ only 18 months ago by Jose Mourinho.

That boy is now the millionaire manager of England.

And do not underestimate the significance of ‘millionaire’ to someone who grew up in a house without a fridge.

‘Would England be interested in me?’ asked Allardyce the morning after Sunderland had secured their Premier League status in May. His tone was dismissive, not plaintive.

Circumstance has helped: there is a scarcity of English managers.

Even so, not too long ago Allardyce did not think that would help him attain what he calls ‘the ultimate dream’. WHEN Allardyce said that he could not fight the label, it was a week or so on from that morning after Sunderland had survived and he was reviewing the season and going back to his previous two spells on Wearside. He had arrived as a player under Ken Knighton in 1980 and returned as an academy coach under Peter Reid in 1996.

Allardyce was interesting on the club’s evolution.

‘I know how to build,’ he said. ‘It’s how can we build? It depends on what we recruit, but that’s not all, it doesn’t just happen by buying good players. The club infrastructure should be about building an environment for success.’

Sunderland has not been an environment for success — Allardyce was the club’s 10th manager in nine years when he was appointed as Dick Advocaat’s successor last october.

Having finished at West Ham, Allardyce was relaxing in his Spanish villa last summer, rejecting a call from Sunderland along the way. When, after eight games, Sunderland were bottom of the Premier League with three points, they called again. And so Allardyce was introduced, not for the first time, as the man to fight a fire.

Actually, the label chosen then was ‘trouble-shooter’. Seven months later, with Sunderland 17th and safe on 39 points, Allardyce reflected on the terminology: ‘I said I’m a trouble-shooter based on the idea that “Sam will keep you up”.’

Had remoulding Sunderland, coaxing three wins and seven draws from their last 11 matches not changed perceptions?

‘I’ll still be perceived as that,’ replied Allardyce. ‘It’s a label. I accept it because you can’t fight the label in football.’

Yet he has been doing just that almost since the day he entered professional football in 1969.

In the 1980s Allardyce was privately reading Eat To Win, a book on sports nutrition by Robert Haas that influenced Martina Navratilova. Publicly, much later, he was declaring that were his surname ‘Allardici’ he would be more in fashion. of course, there has been the odd benefit to labels. He will surely have noted Pep Guardiola mentioning ‘the Big Sam’ on his Manchester City unveiling.

This is all part of the contradiction. The macho defender reveals in his autobiography — Big Sam — that he was a mother’s boy back home in Dudley. His father, a police sergeant from Aberlour, was hard, cold and a drinker.

When it came to football, Allardyce was tempted by the £50 reward for bursting a ball in a tackle as offered by Bolton manager Ian Greaves. Yet he was also entranced by colleague Frank Worthington.

‘England has a sorry history of marginalising flair players,’ Allardyce wrote of Worthington.

When it came to management, Allardyce chose not to mimic English Saturday afternoons, when he was sent out with a shot of whisky, instead referring to what he had seen and learned in his few months with Tampa Bay Rowdies in America in 1983. What Allardyce witnessed there was sporting infrastructure, technical and intellectual — miles ahead of England. It gave him an edge, he said.

It did not give him an entry, however. When he stopped playing, aged 37 in 1992, English managers were still dominant — in that first Premier League season, 16 of the 22 club managers were English.

Yet Allardyce ended up in Limerick in the League of Ireland, working for a priest. From there he got a job coaching at Preston North End. That was progressing until John Beck came in with a route zero style Allardyce describes as ‘brain-dead’. Pushed to the margins of the club, it was while scouting for Preston that Allardyce saw a Dunfermline defender he recommended: David Moyes.

In 1994 Allardyce got the Blackpool job, taking on a team that had avoided relegation to the fourth tier by a point. So began a pattern: Allardyce to the rescue.

Blackpool got to the play-offs. Then came Big Sam’s dismissal from owen oyston’s prison cell.

Next were Notts County and Allardyce was in that fourth tier with relegated, demotivated players. Promotion was won in his second season. He was doing well — five per cent commission on transfers — and acquiring a reputation. Bolton, his first love, called. Appointed as manager on his 45th birthday in 1999, Allardyce stayed seven-and-a-half years. This is perhaps the period we should read the most into.

on succeeding Colin Todd, Bolton were 12th in what is now the Championship; when Allardyce left, in May 2007, Bolton were seventh in the Premier League, had reached a League Cup final and qualified twice for Europe.

It was about more than the bottom line, though. Arsene Wenger and Rafa Benitez believed Allardyce’s Bolton were hoofball merchants who had plenty in common with Allardyce’s description of himself as a centre-half: ‘Dirty b ****** .’

But from inside Bolton, Gary Speed was saying: ‘Sam’s portrayed sometimes as old school, but he’s open to ideas. He’ll try anything and if he gets one per cent here, one per cent there, then it adds up. It’s a very grown-up way to be — Pilates, stretching, yoga, none of that is outlandish and it works.’

It was at Bolton that Sir Alex Ferguson first took notice. Ferguson is glowing about the state of Bolton’s analysis and fitness. David Gill, on the FA board, will have listened. Allardyce’s work at Bolton earned him the Newcastle United job in 2007.

Yet this was around the same time as the Quest investigation into transfers. Allardyce was interviewed and didn’t like the innuendo.

Newcastle did not share any misgivings. There was a three-year contract but the club was sold after three weeks to Mike Ashley and Allardyce lasted seven months.

When he returned, it was at Blackburn Rovers, 19th in the Premier League. More trouble to shoot. Allardyce got them to 15th.

At West Ham there was a similar story: relegated under Avram Grant, the brief was to get West Ham back up. Allardyce did so.

Then Sunderland; more trouble, more shooting. And now England, a team who lost their last match to Iceland. The only way is up.

Michael Walker’s book on North-East football: Up There (2016 edition) is out now in paperback.

It was at Bolton that Sir Alex Ferguson first took notice