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Interesting to read the tweet from West Bromwich Albion:
‘We are delighted to confirm the appointment of Sam Allardyce as our new Head Coach.’
You are what? Delighted to confirm the appointment of Fat Sam, the high priest of anti-football, the man who turned ‘The Beautiful Game’ into ‘The Game’. As Lindsey Buckingham once sang, what’s the world coming to?
It’s obvious what happens next. Allardyce will preside over a steady recovery of WBA’s fortunes. The team that Slaven Bilić put together to guide the team out of the Championship into the Premiership will start picking up points. They will get ugly wins, ugly draws and ugly wins. It will not look pretty because nothing ever looks pretty when Allardyce is around. But come next May, he will have guided his new club to a place of safety in the Premier League and the fans will be pleased both that they live to fight again in the Premier League and that COVID-19 meant they weren’t allowed in the ground to watch the action.
“Ah, but Allardyce is a winner,” some Baggies fans may say. “He has a great track record.” And so he has, if you regard grinding out results by a combination of hard graft and hoofball. In terms of saving teams that are seemingly doomed to relegation, he is regarded as The Man. But is mere survival enough?
Let us be be brutally honest: Allardyce is a short term appointment. That’s why he has only been given an 18 month contract. This is not WBA’s long term strategy for progression. He is not there to win trophies. In fact he has never been the coach to win things. You’d go for a Klopp or a Mourinho if you wanted that.
He regards his ‘greatest achievement’ in the Premier League as leading Bolton into Europe and his pride and joy must surely be his Carling Cup loser’s medal when he was boss at Crystal Palace. Given that his coaching career began back in 1989, this is not a stellar record, is it?
But still clubs keep knocking on his door, almost always clubs who are in trouble. Allardyce at his best could save the club in his first season and then getting sacked in the second when progress ground to a halt and when fans tired of the ghastly football his teams play.
And so it will be at WBA, too, where doubtless they will hand him the cheque book to squander on the hardworking journeymen who always make up the bulk of his teams.
As someone once put it, “a monkey with learning difficulties could do the same job he does”. I think that’s a bit unfair to people with learning difficulties.
