There was a time when more than Big Sam Allardyce’s weight seemed genuinely groundbreaking. As Bolton manager he became renowned as one of the Premier League’s pioneering sports scientists, advocating the use of Prozone analysis, yoga sessions, rhetorical rectal prolapses, and daily pills. And with scant resources he was forced to scour Europe and take chances on talented players who were out of favour or growing old.
But that was more than a decade ago. And as the game has moved on Allardyce’s worst features seem to have become more and more pronounced. The tactics are more negative than ever, with every match offering up to Allardyce the tantalising prospect of a low-scoring draw, and with money to spend he has tended to squander it on supposedly safe purchases who too often have lacked quality and fallen short.
Now he has the England job he hardly deserves, Allardyce is honking his horn and thinking big once again. In charge of a relatively small pool of technically inferior players, he might not seem like the best fit. Yet in his first press conference as England manager, he wondered ‘Hopefully I can be as successful as I have been at other football clubs’.
A hope or a threat, because as a manager Allardyce’s top-flight win percentage stands at 33.6%. The same sort of performance on the international stage would make him by some margin the worst England manager of all time.
The relatively brief reigns endured by Kevin Keegan and Joe Mercer at least resulted in win percentages of 38.9% and 42.9%. Next is Graham Taylor, with 47.4%. And at the upper end of the spectrum stand Sven-Göran Eriksson (59.7%), Ron Greenwood (60.0%), Glenn Hoddle (60.7%), Alf Ramsey (61.1%), and Fabio Capello (66.7%), meaning that two foreigners – a distrusted class of people utterly discounted from the selection process this time round – have provided England with among their most winsome periods.
Fat Sam may seem like a sound football man, he may eat pork pies and beef stews and speak the tongue and know how to thicken his pot, but could he not in fact be the enemy within, ready to feast on English football’s grisly innards?
