Next England manager: Sam Allardyce's West Ham stint shows exactly why he's the man to rescue Three Lions

Boo boys: Allardyce's Strong Man approach would be perfect fit for England role
(GLYN KIRK/AFP/Getty Images)
John Dillon13 July 2016

It was the defining image of Sam Allardyce’s fractious time as manager of West Ham.

As boos rang around Upton Park following a win by the Hammers against Hull City in March, 2014, Big Sam cupped a hand to his ear in a challenging gesture of defiance to the jeering supporters.

Was he worried? Was he troubled? No, he was up for a row and the fans duly got a mouthful in the press conference after the game.

“Deluded and brain-washed,” he later called the Boleyn Ground’s faithful, the ex-manager and the Cockney hordes as far apart as ever in their belief in the “West Ham Way.”

This is one of many reasons why he should be made England’s next manager. We need a Strong Man now, although there is far more to Allardyce than that.

The unique pressures of the job turned Roy Hodgson away from all the ideals and principles that had made him successful in the first place, only for Portugal to then win Euro 2016 applying those very methods of defensive rigour and organisation.

That makes clear that the need for someone of Allardyce’s self-assurance, experience and pugnacity is greater than ever, even if he so much more than a mere tough guy and the “hoofer,” of unfortunate popular image – as the effervescent football played by West Ham in the first half of his final season there in 2014-15 reminds us.

Quite clearly, he understands how to motivate players to buy into his ideas, too.

Meanwhile, Jurgen Klinsmann, Laurent Blanc Arsene Wenger et al, shouldn’t ever have been considered for the role.

It ought to be against the rules to appoint a foreign coach in international football

This version of the game is meant to be a test of the best one country can produce against the best of another. That is the very plain and simple point of it.

Just as plain and simple was the way that Portugal won in France with a strategy based on stealth, defence, caution and planning, winning just one game out of seven in normal time.

It was very much at odds with their prior reputation for flamboyance. Even that, however, shone a searching light on what is wrong with the sorry, bedraggled and utterly confused and bewildered England team.

The usual routine after a tournament is for the FA to begin copying the ways of whoever won, most commonly Germany and Spain in recent times but before that, France.

The bookies' favourites to succeed Roy Hodgson

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Yet the Portuguese coach, Fernando Santos, won the tournament basically practising what Hodgson had already spent most of his own four-decades long management career applying to a vast host of sides all around the globe.

That is until the madness of the England job gripped him and he abandoned all his core beliefs and dived headlong into oblivion.

This massive, almost laughable irony has been yet another case of you couldn’t make it up for the FA, by the way.

How on Earth did we manage to get ourselves ejected so quickly from a competition which was played out – and won - largely along the lines of Hodgson’s own mental play-book?

Here’s how. The English, having bowed to the endless bleat demanding that the kids be given a chance, then couldn’t even perform the basics of defending and getting themselves in shape at the back, let alone offer enough with and invention to open up any of their opponents or mount a serious attacking threat.

Hope lives on, of course. It has to. And Allardyce will be the correct choice to take command as the best qualified English coach available.

There is a serious body of evidence – most recently in Sunderland’s relegation escape act last season - that Allardyce is a specialist in embedding shape, planning, forethought and a hard-headed mentality into his teams.

That is all England need to ask of any manager just now. Any grandiose ideas about dazzle and style will have to come later. They are being squeezed out of international football, anyway.

This is a job which does strange things to those who inhabit it, of course.

But it is difficult at this stage to envisage Allardyce being bullied by either the public or the media into going against his own set of certainties and ideas, which are among the most bullishly-held and successfully worked in English football.

True enough, the job even defeated the Italian tough guy, Fabio Capello. But remember, he left in 2012 insisting that it was us who had everything wrong, not him and that he had our number as a weak, scared, uneducated football nation. Subsequent events have rather confirmed that he had a point. Haven’t they?

Before anyone snobbishly points out that Allardyce is little more than a rescue expert – a Fireman for hire - whose speciality is saving and re-building fallen and collapsing clubs like West Ham were in 2011 and Sunderland were last season, are not England in an even worse state right now?

Don’t they need rescuing, re-building and over-hauling? Of course they do. More than ever before.

This image does him a dis-service anyway. He has been ahead of the game for a long time now in the application of sports science and statistics and in the wake of this, a while new industry of football analytics has built up across the game.

The difference is that he doesn’t just talk about the numbers or write them on a white-board and look pleased with himself for being so clever.

He turns them into results on the pitch.

When Dick Advocaat quit Sunderland in despair last October, he described the task of keeping them up as The Impossible Job. Allardyce arrived and pulled it off.

The England role has been described that way for decades now. Big Sam, however, is England’s best specialises in Art of The Possible.

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