Allardyce keen to ensure his point hits home and guides Palace to safety...

IT HAS been ‘home truths’ week at Crystal Palace’s Beckenham training ground.

Manager Sam Allardyce has seen his side throw away three chances to secure the point they need for safety with three straight defeats, so he has been emphasising in the build-up to the biggest match of Palace’s season, against relegation rivals Hull City, just how it affects the lives of everyone involved: the job losses, wage cuts and ruination of a project built since they were promoted to the Premier League four years ago.

There have been hours of discussions and meetings. On the training pitch the defence, depleted by injuries and who conceded five against Manchester City in their last game to leave Allardyce seriously concerned, has been the focus.

A point will do against Marco Silva’s Hull this afternoon and one of the mantras Allardyce drilled into the players when he arrived last December was: ‘Respect the point’. With the attacking players in their ranks — such as Wilfried Zaha, Christian Benteke and Andros Townsend — it was not popular and at first the players did not respond. By February, the club already looked down.

But the little things have helped. The players have been regularly handed print-outs with motivational messages; fringe players are told what they can do to become first-team players, first-team players are given ways to raise their game. Allardyce intensely monitors training and matches and statistics — running, energy, distances — have improved by up to a third.

‘You can’t relish that scenario but what you do have is this overall feeling that “You’re the man in charge, you’re responsible for the outcome” and you like to live under that pressure,’ said Allardyce. ‘You deal with that and the satisfaction comes from trying to change things to help the team get better and in some cases it doesn’t work. But that’s not going to be this weekend. I hope the players think as positively as me.’

Relegation has been intrinsically linked to Allardyce his whole life — it is mentioned 26 times in his autobiography, ‘Big Sam’. As a 16-year-old, in 1971, he feared missing out on a professional contract at Bolton, but they were relegated from the old Division Two and first-team players were cleared out. On Allardyce’s 17th birthday he signed terms of £14 per week with a £125 signing on fee.

By 29, he had already been through more relegations than a player cares to experience, staying up at Coventry with a final-day victory against Norwich. ‘Yet again I’d been involved in a final-day drama,’ he wrote in Big Sam. ‘It was getting too much for the old ticker.’

His heart, at that stage, had no idea what was to come.

It was at Notts County as a manager, who he took charge of in January 1997, that Allardyce first learned that screaming and hollering at the players all the time did not work.

They went 18 games without winning and, while he has never been relegated from the Premier League, they went down from Division Two that season.

Four years later, after winning promotion to the Premier League for the first time at Bolton, Allardyce kept them up against the odds, securing survival with a 4-1 win in what was billed as a relegation decider with Ipswich.

As motivation, Allardyce had a deal with the players that, if they conceded three goals in a game, they had to eat sheep testicles, but if they scored three, the backroom staff had to. ‘Sheep’s testicles were back on the menu but they tasted like caviar,’ Allardyce wrote at the time. ‘We were safe and frankly it felt like winning a title.’

Almost two decades on, the menu is more conservative but the stakes are higher.

Allardyce is due a bonus near to £1 million should he keep Palace up but those close to the 62-yearold explain that it is not about the money for him, it is about his professional reputation; proving once again why Sam Allardyce was offered the England job last July and that the scandal that followed and saw him sacked does not have to define him.

‘It has certainly helped me get over the disappointment of the England scenario,’ Allardyce said of the challenge at Palace. ‘It would make a great book! It would be about 10 chapters on its own, that. Unfortunately there’s a lot of confidentiality that wouldn’t allow the book to be a best-seller!

‘The diversity of this last 18 months or so has been quite remarkable to say the least. Getting back into football was the main aim for me, because football is what it’s all about for me and certainly the Premier League is where I’ve been for many years now.’

If the ‘home truths’ have indeed hit home this week, then that will be exactly where Allardyce and Crystal Palace are next season.