Such a shame Sam couldn’t see that he had to change
MANY of us have been there with Sam Allardyce. A late night, a few drinks. Some big talk from Big Sam. Some of it would set you thinking, some of it would have you howling. Some of it you maybe wouldn’t want to repeat.
It has always been a part of the brutish charm. A real human being, warts and all, surviving his own way in an industry that feeds paranoia and destroys trust.
The problem is that all the loud and proud stuff doesn’t sit so well when you are England manager.
The most important and prestigious role in English football, it is a different job with different boundaries. Allardyce was always going to have to bend to make it fit and it is to our surprise, and his lasting detriment, that he wasn’t smart enough to realise.
So he’s gone almost before he arrived, skewered in part by what made some of us like him in the first place.
Many in the game were quick to express private regret last night. Allardyce is popular among the management community and several experienced and respected members of the League Managers’ Association were instrumental in the campaign to get him appointed by the FA in the first place.
But as one said rather bluntly yesterday: ‘The things he has said have made him look and sound like an idiot that he actually isn’t. It’s hard to believe he has been so stupid.’
One of the many regrettable things about this whole affair is that Allardyce didn’t necessarily have to go. He needed to apologise, privately and publicly, and he needed to change. He has been stupid and reckless, boorish and naïve.
From the moment the Daily Telegraph published their story late on Monday night, it was going to be a very tight call. But he didn’t have to go.
In talking — rather vaguely as it happens — around the thorny issue of third-party player ownership, Allardyce came perilously close to crossing a line from which his employers would have had absolutely no choice. But he didn’t quite cross it.
So if the FA had really wanted to, had they been brave enough, they could have let him continue towards what would essentially have been a trial by football and its public over the coming matches.
But now that option has gone. England are without a long-term manager and Allardyce, one of our brightest homegrown managers of recent years, is essentially without a career.
Certainly the greatest sin Allardyce committed in the Telegraph’s sting was to chase money. Nobody ever wears greed well and it fits particularly badly when you are only a week into a new job.
On this occasion, Allardyce’s enthusiasm for extra-curricular earnings gave the impression that he was less than 100 per cent committed and focussed on his post and it was not a good look.
In terms of his comments about Roy Hodgson, Gary Neville and the weak mentality he recognised in England’s players, there really was nothing to see. That was a coach talking — admittedly rather colourfully — about the need for self-belief and strong leadership in his role, qualities for which he was hired in the first place.
As for his reference to the England players and their mental approach to international football, he has already questioned that on the record. Anybody who seriously believes any of the national squad would have given a hoot about it when they turned up for training next week clearly does not understand modern footballers very well.
Despite all that, an obvious question to emerge from this week’s revelations was one that asked why a manager earning a £3million a year would be so nakedly interested in a £400,000 motivational speaking invite, a gig he would have known full well would not have been granted approval by the FA.
THE answer is to be found, in part, buried deep within an English football management culture that breeds inferiority complexes and jealousy. Allardyce has for years felt under-appreciated by the game he has served. His embarrassing self-anointment as a ‘keynote speaker’ in the Telegraph transcript sounded very much like a man desperately trying to join a select group from which he had so long felt excluded.
None of this excuses Allardyce. He should never have even been in the room discussing sensitive and inappropriate subjects with people he didn’t know. And if he had insisted, his agent Mark Curtis should have stood in his way, rather than walk in there with him.
Only on Monday at a Football Writers’ Golf Day, Allardyce was telling colleagues past and present how much he had taken to international management. He was planning, he told one, to take a break in Dubai at Christmas with a 100 per cent World Cup qualifying record behind him.
It was typical Allardyce. Confident, optimistic and self-assured; three of the qualities you need in this game. What we didn’t know was that by then he had already lost track of another important one, judgment.
When asked about Allardyce, I often used to tell people it was to his credit that he hadn’t really changed much over the years. What a truly modern sporting tragedy that on the one occasion he really needed to, he just couldn’t do it.