da dobrowin：
da bwin： When Roberto Mancini’s Manchester City came to West Ham United in November 2012, they faced a side selected by Sam Allardyce. In the build-up, it was the future England manager who made one of English football’s most famous utterances, though few remember his very next words: “That was tongue in cheekâ€.
“I won’t ever be going to a top-four club because I’m not called Allardici, just Allardyce.â€
Sam Allardyce, November 2012
So caricatured is Allardyce that anything to reinforce the notion of the bruising, unsophisticated and embarrassingly old school manager ends up sticking, and probably more than it should do. And that makes him something of a paradox, a product of the Premier League’s obsession with managers; itself a fetish which grows steadily year on year. Oddly, he is one of the most well-known names in the history of the Premier League, and yet also one of its most reviled. Notoriety rather than fame, perhaps, but he spills journalistic ink either way.
That comes from his obvious pragmatism. He is both a manager who embraces technological advances and the possibilities they hold for football, as well as a coach whose primary function is to stop the other team from imposing their game onto his own, usually less talented, bunch of committed professionals. His lifespan in the top division – almost two decades – is reminiscent of Arsene Wenger or Alex Ferguson, even if his star tended to float somewhere beneath the highest and brightest in the firmament.
But there is still a feeling amongst some British managers that they don’t get a fair crack when it comes to the biggest jobs. Recently enough, Allardyce, Tony Pulis, Sean Dyche and others have complained about it, but it was the former Bolton Wanderers manager who articulated those grievances, which were perhaps solidified after being overlooked for the England job in 2006. It was a joke, though like all awkward jokes it was a joke with an edge to it, and it was an accusation that hit home.
Indeed, Allardyce’s autobiography includes the revelation that, when invited to speak to the FA about the vacant England manager’s job after the departure of Sven-Goran Eriksson, he intended to present a “real knock-your-socks-off interview†for the FA, only to be told there were no facilities to allow him to present his PowerPoint.
It paints the paradoxical picture of a man who embraces a thoroughly modern way of working – even to his own detriment when it came to presenting to the FA bosses in 2006 – but also a man whose approach to football has been decried as ‘long-ball’, and even ‘19th century’. His public perception has never really cut through the veil of smoke screening the tactician behind it from the Proper Football Man in front of it. Pints of wine, chains around his neck and his less than elegant gum chewing manner in the dugout do nothing to help. Yet none of those perceptual issues have any impact on his ability to manage a football team.
The Premier League changed what was to be considered sophisticated. As it strived to garner a global appeal, it marketed the most globally resonant sideshows of football in England: packed stadiums, games played in daylight (a crucial sense of exoticism for audiences watching at night time, like a World Cup in South America to British eyes), chants from the stands and microphones placed strategically beside the crowd in order to maximise its audibility as the game goes on. Even Arsene Wenger once marvelled at how the English crowd responds to every on-pitch event, even cheering for corners sometimes even throw-ins.
Marketing that is easy, but the football itself can sometimes be harder. That’s why the point of the Premier League now seems not so much to sell football to fans who want to come to the grounds to watch, but to sell the spectacle to TV companies all over the world. No longer is it about 50,000 people watching a game in a stadium, but about the thrilling idea that such a huge crowd could be enrapt in a thrills-and-spills drama.
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Allardyce could never really fit into that. Despite his modernising qualities, he still belonged to an older style of manager who seem more like snooker hall devotees than footballing philosophers. They are the practical thinkers who know how to outsmart their opponent, the tacticians who come without airs and pretensions, but that doesn’t fit the modern packaging so carefully crafted by years of Premier League growth. These days, a supposedly more sophisticated bunch with a more luxurious style of charm sells better. Tragically, it doesn’t just sell better in Asian or American markets – it sells better in England, too.
But, as always with Allardyce, that’s only part of the problem. Foreign managers aren’t just sexier, but they can often be better and for a multitude of reasons. For one thing, Champions League experience is something Allardyce doesn’t have, and whilst you may argue he hasn’t been given the chance to get that, you do wonder whether taking a job abroad rather than in the Premier League might have helped in that regard.
Allardyce has always been a man with his finger on the pulse when it comes to the transfer market in Europe, his signings have helped many’s a team out of relegation trouble, but the only reason he has been able to do that is through understanding that foreign imports are cheaper and often hungrier, attempting to impress at a smaller club in the hope of making it to a bigger one. They aren’t better because they are foreign, they just have a bigger impact.
But ironically, not going in the opposite direction arguably held Allardyce back. He clearly wasn’t averse to travelling in order to get his chance – he started his managerial career at Limerick City in the League of Ireland – but when he made it to the Premier League with Bolton, perhaps he did think he’d made it as a top manager, and maybe that’s why the lack of a truly big job rankled so much.
As Rory Smith has pointed out, throughout the Premier League years, football has changed so much that there is now a hierarchy of clubs: those at the top require a different set of skills from their manager than those below. Across Europe, there is also a hierarchy of clubs in the Champions League; there are bigger ones and smaller ones. The path isn’t as linear as it once was.
Allardyce played a huge role in that, his input into British thinking about foreign players and imported managers was partially developed by his own successes with foreign players – especially ones who weren’t already big names, but who were shrewd purchases designed to do a certain job.
He himself became typecast in the very same way.