Battered and bruised Sam Allardyce will be looking back in anger

From The Times

January 10, 2008

After missing out on England, he was given too little time on Tyneside

Oliver Kay

As he walked out of the manor house in the Oxfordshire hamlet of Chippinghurst in April 2006, Sam Allardyce was quietly confident that he had got the job. Not just the job, but The Job. He had just bowled over the FA’s six-man interview panel with a mightily impressive presentation on his plans to succeed Sven-Göran Eriksson as England head coach and, while reluctant to get too far ahead of himself, he told those closest to him that he was happy with how it had gone.

Less than two years later, Allardyce must wonder whether his chauffeur ran over a black cat on their way home that afternoon. He freely admitted to being “devastated” at losing out to Steve McClaren for the England job and, as he sought to recover from that blow, he was quickly hit by another: the BBC Panorama documentary that alleged corruption at Bolton Wanderers involving his son, Craig, an agent.

Soon he began to talk of stress and sleepless nights, a combination that compounded his gut feeling that he had taken Bolton as far as he could, and then came an offer that, fatefully, he could not refuse: an opportunity to drink from the poisoned chalice that the Newcastle United manager’s job has become.

If Allardyce could turn back the clock, he might have got on his knees and begged as he left the FA councillors in the drawing room at Chippinghurst Manor. He might have encouraged his son to distance himself from Bolton in his business dealings — or at least to be more discreet when confronted with an undercover reporter from Panorama. He might even have chosen to stay at the Reebok Stadium and to attempt to lead the club into another Uefa Cup campaign after their seventh-placed finish in the Premier League last season. But he almost certainly would not have accepted the job at Newcastle had he known that he would be given half a season to show that he was the manager to turn around the club’s ailing fortunes.

Allardyce is a manager whose diverse methods — many of them based on sports science, psychology and extreme physical conditioning — were never going to work overnight at Newcastle, so it seemed imperative that he was given time to implement them.

With more time, he might have done — or, alternatively, his players might have been so unreceptive to his ideas that they would have done more harm than good. By hiring Allardyce, the previous Newcastle board, led by Freddy Shepherd, bought into a five-year plan, but, with results suffering and the spirits of supporters plumbing new depths, the new owner, Mike Ashley, felt that he had seen enough after less than five months of the new campaign.

When he was approached by Newcastle in 2004, after the dismissal of Sir Bobby Robson, Allardyce rejected the job, partly because he felt he still had work to do at Bolton and partly because he sensed that the club were in a mess that nobody could sort out.

Last summer, having left Bolton with a fortnight of the season remaining, he finally said yes to Shepherd because he felt that, after the dismissals of Robson, Graeme Souness and Glenn Roeder in quick succession, the new man would be given time to rebuild the club from the bottom up. Maybe, had it not been for the takeover by Ashley, he would have been granted a little more time, although Shepherd’s track record in that regard hardly inspires confidence.

Perhaps last night’s decision will prove the right one for Newcastle — and perhaps for Allardyce, too. The “break” that he prescribed himself on his departure from Bolton last April never transpired, so maybe it will now as he attempts to recover from the turbulent events of the past two years, perhaps by spending a few weeks at his house in Spain, where his holidays are usually interrupted constantly by telephone calls from agents.

But Allardyce, at 53, will not want to stay idle for long. An educated punt is that his availability may spark interest from Wolverhampton Wanderers, where Mick McCarthy is said to be vulnerable. Just down the road from his native town of Dudley, a club in need of inspiration as they look to return to their former glories: doubtless to the concern of McCarthy, it already sounds like the perfect fit.