My England heartache: Big Sam on trauma that still haunts him

SAM ALLARDYCE ON AGONY OF LOSING ENGLAND JOB

THE drive home, that 200 or so miles from Wembley to his house in Bolton, is what Sam Allardyce describes as his darkest moment.

He says he was mentally and physically shattered, so utterly devastated by the sudden and painfully premature end to his tenure as England manager that it was all he could do to apply enough pressure to the accelerator to propel his Mercedes along the motorway.

‘Driving back that night, on my own, I had never driven so slowly in my life,’ he says. ‘A few people rang. I spoke to them.

‘But that was a long, long drive. There was nothing on the road but I just sat at 50mph. Five-anda-half hours it took. Slowly, slowly. I couldn’t turn the radio on; just drove in silence. It was just s*** … s*** … s***.’

Little more than a fortnight later and Allardyce was hiding in the sanctuary of his Spanish villa with wife Lynne. England were contesting what would have been only his second game in charge, a World Cup qualifier against Malta.

‘I couldn’t watch,’ he says. ‘I tried to. I maybe lasted 15, 20 minutes. I had to turn it off and watch something else. It was Wembley and I hadn’t even had the opportunity to get a game under my belt there. That would have been a big moment for me. It was a gut wrencher, that.’

He was so proud on the day he was unveiled as England manager. Fastening the FA pin badge to the lapel of his new navy suit. Adding his own touch with a personalised, monogrammed shirt.

‘I was ready,’ he says. ‘I felt comfortable and we made a good start, winning that first game in Slovakia. Then all of a sudden it was over.’ After 67 days.

Allardyce chooses his words carefully because this is the first time he has spoken in any detail about the circumstances that led to his dramatic departure.

He is keen to reflect on his rehabilitation and his success in keeping Crystal Palace in the Premier League. But he first needs to deal with that Daily

Telegraph sting and those covert recordings. He knows he messed up. In the telephone conversations he did have on that journey home from Wembley, he admitted to being ‘a **** ing idiot’.

The original revelations were embarrassing for him and the FA. In the bogus meetings with undercover reporters last August, the newly appointed England manager might have stressed that any agreement would have to be approved by his FA employers before he could accept £400,000, but he was accused of being greedy and of giving advice on how to circumvent third-party ownership regulations. Not only that, he mocked predecessor Roy Hodgson for his pronunciation of r-words.

‘That was embarrassing for me,’ he says. ‘I haven’t spoken to Roy. I made a decision not to call him. I thought it would be better to wait until I saw him, face to face. But I haven’t seen him yet. That will be the time to address it though.’

He maintains he only attended the meetings to help an old friend down on his luck. Scott McGarvey, a Scots football agent and former player, had also been duped into thinking he was about to land a lucrative new job.

‘He was so desperate, the lad, for this position and I thought there was no harm going along to see if I could help him,’ says Allardyce. ‘And he was saying it was possible that, on the back of that, there could be something in it for me, if I fancied it. A lot of it’s a blur now because you end up in a position where you’ve had your life devastated. You go through this process where people are taking photos of you and writing things, even though I had nothing to do with the stories that followed in the Telegraph.

‘I have a thick skin but not for that because it’s not just you. There wasn’t a lot of substance to what they had but it’s your kids, grandkids, the missus. We stuck together and got through it but I went through every emotion.’

He says he did sense something was not right about McGarvey’s new business associates. ‘We did half suspect something wasn’t right about it. Mark (Curtis, his agent) had said: “Fake Sheikh”.

‘The biggest mistake I made was when I then met them in Manchester. I should have just kept quiet and said I’ll help Scott if I can. But I stayed too long and, like everything else, if you tell a story in private. If we all had stories we tell in private recorded, you know what I mean?’

Allardyce was playing in a sportswriters’ golf day at Stoke Park, on what turned out to be his penultimate day as England manager, when he first realised he had a major problem.

‘I got a call and the phone didn’t stop ringing,’ he says. ‘The emotional impact first hit me driving back from the course and then when it hit the paper. It’s what it was involved with that hurt me, because my part of the story wasn’t about corruption. It had nothing to do with the stories that followed, with the claims about agents and unnamed managers. Mine was about taped conversations and using parts of those conversations to say I was greedy, I was breaking the rules. It was only greedy if I had done it.’

After a sleepless night in Bolton, he drove to Wembley the following morning to meet the FA. At no point going into that meeting did he fear for his job. On reflection, plenty of observers think the FA acted too soon, that had they waited and seen that the rest of the ‘revelations’ did not concern their manager, they might have been able to ride out the storm.

‘It’s worth remembering the police didn’t discover anything worthy of investigation,’ says Allardyce. ‘Before a parliamentary select committee, Robert Sullivan from the FA said I hadn’t been in breach of any FA rules. Or told anybody how to breach FA guidelines on third-party ownership. He said I was actually doing nothing more than stating the FA’s position. When I went to Wembley I didn’t think I was about to lose my job. I just thought it was going to be a discussion about how we navigate through it.

‘But the process was not what I expected. People have told me if it was a similar-sized business, there would have been a lengthier HR process. I’m not criticising the FA because they felt they needed to make a decision.’

WHEN he arrived home in the early hours of the next morning, Lynne was still up. ‘I just sat there with her,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t believe what had happened. But she was very upbeat, saying: “It’s happened, you’ve got to get over it. Whatever s*** comes our way, we’ll get over it and get on with it”.’

Support from friends helped. ‘When I got back from Spain, Fergie invited me to a game,’ he says. ‘He told me to get up and get back out there. He’s a man of great wisdom. The more people like that who support you, the quicker you recover.’

Palace are as grateful to Allardyce for saving them from relegation as he is to them for giving him a way back into the game: ‘I’m really happy I have proved what I can do again after such a difficult time,’ he says. ‘You try to learn from your mistakes. I should have kept my big mouth shut. But that’s a lot of who I am. I’m pretty happy with life again.

‘I did reach the pinnacle of my career by actually getting that (England) job. It’s the only top job I could’ve got because I was never going to get Man United, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool.’

Not that he ever intends to wear the suit again. ‘No chance,’ he says. Not even if he was armed with the lucky coin that served him so well in Slovakia? ‘I tossed that away,’ he says. ‘It’s somewhere in the back garden.’