The Mail on Sunday

Allardyce: I don’t want to lose the saviour tag

- By Joe Bernstein

HAVING previously managed 11 clubs without relegation, Sam Allardyce appreciate­s his new job at West Bromwich Albion is the biggest threat yet to his unblemishe­d record.

Newly promoted, 19th in the table and without the budget to buy their way out of trouble, even the naturally buoyant Allardyce realises this is a job Red Adair may have graciously passed on.

Work for the 66-year-old starts today with a West Midlands derby against Aston Villa, where Albion have to stop English football’s golden boy Jack Grealish if they want to record only their second win of the season, having just sacked Slaven Bilic.

‘It’s never happened before so I think it would kill me if I got relegated. I’d be massively upset,’ admits Allardyce.

‘If I stayed at West Brom and got them back up, that might be a relief but I would still have that tag of actually getting a club relegated so I don’t want to if I can help it. It may happen this time. I can’t guarantee that it won’t happen. I’ll just do my best to get them safe.’

Allardyce’s record as a master of escapology with seven different Premier League clubs — Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn, West Ham, Sunderland, Crystal Palace and Everton — is not to be sniffed at.

There were flashes of the confident Big Sam at last week’s unveiling — he claimed at one stage none of his sackings had been deserved — but he knows the size of the task ahead.

At Palace, he spent £40million in a January transfer window on Patrick van Aanholt, Jeffrey Schlupp and Luka Milivojevi­c to help keep them in the division, sums that are beyond West Brom.

He doesn’t know many of the squad he’s inheriting. Exciting winger Grady Diangana was a kid at West Ham when he managed them but at that time the academy trained in a different building to the first team so their paths never properly crossed.

It’s 18 years since he was wired up to a heart monitor during a Bolton-Leicester game as an experiment to discover the stresses managers come under. Allardyce’s heart rate reached 160 beats per minute and proved the gateway for the League Managers’ Associatio­n to set up the Fit to Manage scheme where managers can get regular health checks.

In 2009, he required heart surgery at Blackburn to widen a coronary artery. He says health was a considerat­ion in taking the Albion job but is sure the benefits to his mental health outweighed any risk.

‘My wife and I do a full body, full medical once every three years. It gives us an indication of where we are with our health,’ he says. ‘I had two stents which caused me to look after myself more than I did before that. I was looking after the players but probably ignoring my own health a little bit at that particular time.

‘So I have learnt to deal with the pressures of football but also learnt to know that my health is very important, not only for me but for my wife, my children and my grandchild­ren.

‘But I do know this stimulatio­n you get from football can also give you the right mental health if you like, by not getting down, by not feeling worthy, by not having anything to do involved in football any more.’

Allardyce’s England career infamously lasted just one match, a win in Slovakia, before he was sacked for damaging comments made while being recorded by an undercover reporter.

He has neverthele­ss continued to enjoy a career helping Premier League clubs in strife.

It’s fitting his first opponent this time is Villa’s Dean Smith, another former centre-half hailing from the West Midlands who has done the hard yards with lower league clubs before hitting the big time. He said of Allardyce: ‘If you have that many games in the Premier League (more than 500), you’re doing something very well.’

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