We wish him well, but this looks like Graham Taylor all over again
AS IS so often the case at the FA, the plan was that there was no plan. Sam Allardyce is England manager and because it is only decent to greet any new appointment with a degree of optimism, people everywhere are attempting to convince themselves he was always the man who met England’s needs.
He might be, of course. The caricature that this is England’s Mike Bassett moment is unfair. The comedy film about the bombastic northern England manager whose mantra is ‘four four ******* two’ is wrong on many counts. Allardyce is from the Midlands and no one was more at the cutting edge for sports science and video analysis than Allardyce in the early 2000s.
Nothing is more irritating than those who claim Allardyce is some kind of fool when compared with the tactical wizardry of a hipster foreign manager. If you think Allardyce doesn’t have tactics and doesn’t think deeply about the game, then you haven’t been paying attention for the past 20 years. Better say you don’t like his tactics than say he has none.
But there’s the rub. England once employed Sir Trevor Brooking to produce a blueprint for the game and he tried to focus FA coaching on the passing style that helped Spain win the 2008 and 2012 Euros and the 2010 World Cup. That was very much Brooking’s creed, a man forged by Ron Greenwood at the West Ham academy, the very same club whose fans ended up angrily rejecting Allardyce and his school of football.
More recently, with the appointment of Dan Ashworth in September 2012 as director of elite development and now technical director, documents were produced to demonstrate that England’s DNA would be about ‘dominating possession intelligently’.
And on paper it wasn’t a bad plan. The likes of Glenn Hoddle will tell you of their huge frustration of sitting in midfield playing for England and watching colleagues launch the ball over their heads; and of the need, when he became England manager, to play an extra man in midfield because he had spent a lifetime watching England fail because the opposition would simply pass round them.
The only problem was that like most plans which read well in the theory, the practice has turned out to be a little trickier. This philosophy has coincided with another new idea, following the expensive embarrassments of Sven-Goran Eriksson (off the pitch) and Fabio Capello (on the pitch), that the coach ought to be English. But the absence of suitable English coaches schooled in the way Ashworth says he wants to play has left the FA in something of a quandary.
The complete failure of the sport’s governing body to nurture English coaches in the past 20 years has always been the gaping hole in the foundations of English football. Managers evolve in their own way anyway and the law of the Championship and the lower reaches of the Premier League, where English coaches mostly work, says that you need to pay homage to the hoarier roots of the English game.
Somewhere, someone at the FA is steeling themselves to tell the public that Allardyce is the appointment to which they have been building to all along. He isn’t and we all know it. In fact, it rather looks like David Gill, as the strongest personality on the selection committee, has prevailed and in doing so has leaned heavily on the advice of Allardyce’s great friend, Sir Alex Ferguson. The only problem is that Gill and Ferguson have only ever had one other stab at appointing a manager and that didn’t turn out so well. Still, David Moyes at least has a new job at Sunderland now Allardyce is with England.
Sunderland played with 39.9 per cent of the possession last season under Allardyce; West Ham with 45.3 per cent in 2014-15, which is why those West Ham fans, raised on Greenwood and John Lyall, hounded him out. Those stats are Allardyce’s comfort zone and where he wants to operate.
We have been down this route before with the appointment of Graham Taylor in 1990, one of English football’s original long-ball men; it didn’t end well. It was always said that, with better players, Taylor would adapt and evolve his style. He didn’t, of course. Under pressure, you always revert to type.
What is hoped is that Allardyce will instill some personality and mental robustness into this side which undoubtedly has talent.
There is nothing special about England; there is no curse; no impossible job. By pretending it is a more difficult role than it really is, we contribute to the team’s national malaise.
Certainly Allardyce ought to bring some of that clear thinking to the job. He deserves his chance and the goodwill of the nation for now. We all hope that he can do something with this team, even if history suggests otherwise.