I would wish Sam Allardyce luck in his new job but for two primary reasons (aside from the fact that I’m not an England supporter or even English, although I certainly wouldn’t wish a double-whammy of Roy Hodgson followed by Sam Allardyce on those who are):
Reason #1: I have about as much respect for the man as he has shown to former Liverpool boss Rafael Benítez over the years i.e. none. It takes a very special kind of malice to dismiss the stunning, career-defining achievement of a peer winning the Champions League as “nowt to do with him” or define 5th, 3rd and 3rd as “some very poor finishes in the Premier League” that left Benítez “very lucky to be in a job” in the opening weeks of the 2007/08 season. Most of all, it was his complicity in Alex Ferguson’s attempts to rattle a surging Liverpool in April 2009 that really exemplifies the character of the new England manager. Having apparently been the subject of “dismissive”, “disrespectful”, “quite humiliating” and “unfortunate gestures” at the hands of Benítez the previous Saturday after Liverpool went 2-0 up on his Blackburn Rovers side, Allardyce, not normally known for his timidity, waited until the following Friday to draw the world’s attention to this supposed insult, no doubt prompted by his LMA cohort’s infamous “beyond the pale” ramblings earlier in the week (no wonder Ferguson is reported to have influenced his appointment as England boss, having said a few weeks ago that “with Sam’s experience, he is the obvious choice”). It would be difficult for me, as I’m sure it would be for you, to stomach seeing someone capable of such childish skulduggery achieving any meaningful level of success.
Reason #2: He doesn’t need anyone to wish him luck because, regardless of what happens over the next few years, two things are virtually certain: (a) with the England manager’s salary recently estimated to be £3.9m (the highest of the 24 coaches at Euro 2016) and the only title wins in his 25-year managerial career so far being the League of Ireland First Division with Limerick in 1992 and the Football League Third Division with Notts. County in 1998, a strong case could be made that Allardyce has already hit the jackpot; and (b) regardless of results (and they should at least be on a par with what went before given that England’s World Cup qualifying group contains Slovakia, Scotland, Slovenia, Lithuania and Malta, and the immediate frame of reference in terms of major tournaments is elimination by Costa Rica and Iceland respectively), whatever Allardyce does will be defined as success both by himself (because that’s what he does – “I would be more suited to Inter Milan or Real Madrid. It wouldn't be a problem for me to manage those clubs because I would win the double or the league every time.”) and, more importantly, by the English football media, who will absolutely love “Big Sam” in a way that the rest of us love “
@TheBig_Sam”.
The nature of the England manager’s job hasn’t changed so much as the perception of the man in charge has, and Englishness has become the primary qualification in the eyes of many. The national team is still attended by a stifling level of pressure and a white-hot spotlight the equal of almost any job in world football, all the more so given the inability of the manager to simply open a wealthy owner’s chequebook and hoover up the best talent. This spotlight, however, which is largely controlled by the mainstream football media, has gradually been directed away from the dugout since Roy Hodgson took charge in May 2012 and towards the pitch. I suppose it’s understandable in a way: after 5 and a half years of Swede Sven-Göran Eriksson and just over 4 years of Italian Fabio Capello, a combined stretch of over a decade with a foreign manager at the helm broken only by the underwhelming and brief Steve McLaren era, it must have come as a blessed relief to the press to welcome Hodgson, a man once described by chief football writer at the Times Henry Winter as “brimming with anecdotes and wisdom garnered from a life in the game” and who “generously hears others’ tales”. And no doubt addressed them by their first names and asked after their families.
Allardyce, irrespective of traditional notions of success, will thrive in this new reality. Post-Ramsey and pre-Hodgson, as the 30 years of hurt developed and grew, later becoming 40 and now 50, it was traditionally the manager who suffered the media’s sticks and stones for the national team’s real and perceived failures, sometimes even when he was doing a comparatively
good job. However, whether it was Bobby Robson or McLaren, Eriksson or Graham Taylor, an Englishman or a foreigner, with a glittering array of Italian, Spanish and European silverware on his CV or a single League Cup, he always suffered
some meaningful degree of criticism, whether warranted or otherwise, logical or hysterical, which typically extended across his time in charge and multiplied as it went. Often it was neither fair nor even justifiable, but it was nonetheless a fact of life. The one possible exception is Terry Venables, who was in the semi-unique position (along with Alf Ramsey in 1966) of managing in a tournament on home soil, left the job after one positive campaign and was, in any case, a “
proper football man” just like Hodgson and Allardyce.
There’s a very good reason why the infamous documentary on Taylor’s doomed efforts to qualify his team for the 1994 World Cup was originally titled “The Impossible Job”. It wasn’t just because Taylor and his players weren’t up to the task, which they clearly weren’t; it was because the job had long since been rendered so suffocating by the range of external forces to which it was subject that any real level of success was, in effect, unattainable. As recently as four months earlier, the manager’s face had been superimposed onto a turnip on the
front page of one particular tabloid rag and the following year his wife and elderly parents would be harassed by reporters for comment on England’s 0-2 loss to the United States.
I outline all of the above as a way of contextualising just how extraordinary the media’s treatment of Hodgson as England manager was, culminating in what we saw in the days following the loss to Iceland. It was no surprise when the media largely defended him during his time at Liverpool, despite him leaving the club five points off the bottom of the table in January 2011, and continued to act as Hodgson cheerleaders despite a six-month reign which was arguably the most underwhelming and distressing of any manager in the club’s history (ok, Graeme Souness circa 15 April 1992 trumps him). These people don’t care about Liverpool Football Club, amply evidenced by the concerted attempts amongst many of them to undermine Benítez’s position over a period of several years, efforts which reached a fever pitch during the 2009/10 season as they finally had a few drops of actual blood to feed on, with Hodgson’s arrival representing the final achievement of their aims.
They do, however, claim to care about England, and so it’s a genuine source of wonder to me that so many continue to downplay his failures to the point where he hasn’t even had to revert to the archetypal bad workman and blame his tools – they’ve been doing it for him! It doesn’t take a visionary, just eyes in your head and a rudimentary knowledge of football history, to conclude that anyone other than Hodgson would have long since been broken down and crushed under the rules of engagement which normally apply to the England job, but not on this occasion. And it’s not that I would have wished the level of vitriol on Hodgson that Taylor (another “decent football man”) had to endure, but to get comparatively little, especially given that his performance as England boss was in some respects historically (and predictably) bad, is a vista as new as it is odd and one from which Allardyce is also likely to benefit.
Having taken over post-Euro 2012 qualification and achieving par at that tournament, more or less, with what had gone before, Hodgson then became the first England manager since Walter Winterbottom in 1958 to lead his team to a first-round exit at the World Cup, a span of 56 years (and at the hands of Costa Rica – at least Winterbottom was up against Lev Yashin’s Soviet Union and Pelé’s Brazil). True, unlike Taylor in 1994 they at least
qualified, but that’s not an argument to set the bar very high, especially for £3.9m per annum. His last act as manager two years later was then to preside over arguably England’s worst ever international defeat against Iceland, certainly the most embarrassing since the United States beat them 1-0 in 1950, a span of 64 years and a result compounded by the ease with which France beat the same team 5-2 a few days later.
Under normal circumstances you might have expected Hodgson to be greeted with some variation on the turnip or “wally with the brolly” motif, especially in an era where everybody seems to have Photoshop (perhaps “owl she wrote” or something to that effect). Instead, what we got was all and sundry bending over backwards to
protect him. Indeed, we were hearing what would ultimately become the media’s “company line” as early as several minutes after the final whistle when Didi Hamann, working for RTÉ, went in hard on the standard of the Premier League. It seemed to escape him that, regardless of how overrated the English players may or may not be by their own media, Lars Lagerbäck and Heimir Hallgrímsson would have probably swapped body parts in exchange for a Daniel Sturridge, a Harry Kane, a Marcus Rashford, even an Eric Dier or a James Milner. I realise that this is not necessarily comparing apples with apples, but neither is effectively calling the English players shit because they’re not as technically gifted as their Spanish or German counterparts. What England, as a
team, lacked in every tournament under Hodgson was organisation and comfort in their own skin, qualities that any manager worth his £3.9m-worth of salt should be able to ingrain in a squad. Lagerbäck and Hallgrímsson certainly managed it, and with far inferior resources.
Meat was then added to the bones of Hamann’s assessment the following day by his former teammate and Sky’s main football analyst (at least until trusty Hodgson lieutenant Gary Neville returns), Jamie Carragher. While he admitted that “Roy Hodgson, inevitably, carries the can…There was no way he could continue as England manager after the results and performances at Euro 2016 and he cannot escape the spotlight”, those words represented less than a
tenth of his column, a fair reflection of the proportion of responsibility placed on Hodgson by the wider football establishment whose criticism of him post-Iceland has generally been buried beneath reams of words attacking the players. According to Carragher, it was these “pampered” individuals, “babies” who are “soft physically and soft mentally”, that were to blame (by the way, Nani, a player that Carragher once reduced to tears
during a game, left France earlier this month with a winners’ medal). For good measure, Henry Winter then wrote an article on 30 June with a headline that trumpeted: “England must stop cocooning spoilt players to succeed”. And earlier this month, Steve Bruce offered a withering assessment of the way the “players arrive, tracksuits, washbags, headphones, in their own world”, as if their German counterparts don’t have iPods or hair gel and as if it matters anyway.
Even those who did criticise Hodgson, like Paul Hayward on 28 June, framed that criticism in such a way as to avoid asking whether the methods which “have translated from Halmstad to Malmo to Orebo to Neuchatel Xamax to the Swiss national team” (generally accepted to represent the “safe” appointment back in 2012) had
ever qualified him for this job any more than they had for Liverpool. According to Hayward, Hodgson “seemed to have a mid-life crisis at this tournament” (he’s 68, for crying out loud), “turned against his basic ideas about football management” and
that’s why it all went pear-shaped. We can only assume that he did similar at the World Cup, then? And if so, does this not beg the question as to where the cacophony of voices was demanding he step aside after his team finished bottom of a group containing Costa Rica? No, instead you had the likes of Winter back in the summer of 2014 arguing that Hodgson was “playing poker with a limited hand against veteran card-sharks” and that “lapses by individual players” were to blame.
Nothing will change as far as Allardyce goes. All the FA have done here is swap those aforementioned methods which “have translated from Halmstad to Malmo to Orebo to Neuchatel Xamax to the Swiss national team” to those which have thus far translated only from Limerick to Blackpool to Notts. County to Bolton to Sunderland (but not so comfortably to Newcastle). The pattern is repeating and, once again, nobody in the mainstream media is raising so much as an eyebrow of surprise or disappointment. After all, Allardyce’s press-conferences will probably be interesting, there’ll be plenty of copy for the media, he’ll no doubt even call them by their first names and do it in a Dudley accent, and isn’t that what truly matters? His team will swat Slovakia, Scotland, Slovenia, Lithuania and Malta aside, and even if they do go out early in two years' time, could it really be any worse than losing to Iceland?
I’ve never been a lover of the England national team or the bullshit surrounding it, but I grew up to a large degree on English culture and I have a lot of time for English people generally. That’s why the saddest part of this is that, in a way, the appointment of Allardyce is so perfectly in keeping with what’s been happening in a wider context. Back at the end of June, it somehow seemed fitting when an England team paralysed by old ideas and beset by empty-headed voices on all sides crashed out of Europe just four days after the country did similar, following a referendum campaign that was won to a large degree by inviting people to look backwards. And while I wouldn’t insult anybody’s intelligence by claiming that any of them speak for anyone here, there have been a number of people involved in the game queuing up to be its version of Nigel Frottage over the past month. Richard “did you smash it?” Keyes’ summation of Allardyce’s imminent appointment this week, for example, captured much of what is increasingly rotten in both English football specifically and English society in general: “Big Sam is the man then! Excellent. Now we can get our game back – re-discover our English DNA. Be English – not whatever is fashionable.” First the country reclaimed, now the game – what a run the English are on.
You see that, and then you read Steve Bruce, apparently an outside contender for the job himself, say that “We've got to get that English spirit back. It’s what we're about, what we’re famous for.”, and it makes you wonder what hope the game in England has now. The single most important thing that could have happened for the English national team in the short-term after Hodgson’s resignation was for the FA to withstand those same dark impulses for self-immolation which gripped the nation during the referendum vote, driven by similarly vacuous voices peddling predictable empty chatter and easy answers. Voices like those of former England captains Paul Ince, Alan Shearer and Rio Ferdinand, all of whom are now paid handsomely for the simple act of opening their mouths, who immediately backed Glenn Hoddle’s candidacy for the England role,
Glenn Hoddle, whose managerial efforts have resulted in the sum total of one League Cup runners-up spot, the Tournoi de France and the undying outrage of both the disabled community and decent people everywhere, as well as a Hodgson-esque sub-40% win ratio.
What the FA have done, in the end, is give in to unreason, appointing a manager with one season’s experience of European competition, who has never managed in the Champions League or won a major trophy in 25 years, and now they’re no doubt sitting back and nodding smugly while those same voices make the case for “Big Sam” based largely on nationality and a weak “but Chris Coleman, Wales…” logic. Right – and Lars Lagerbäck, Iceland… Jorge Luis Pinto, Costa Rica…who else? By that logic, Martin O’Neill’s Republic of Ireland should be regarded as a shining light in the corridors of the FA given that they gave France a game with mostly Premier League reserves and Championship players – hell, maybe they
are considering Allardyce is the FA’s choice, but they shouldn’t be. What can be achieved with Hal Robson-Kanu or Jón Daði Böðvarsson or Jeff Hendrick and what can be achieved with the players at England’s disposal are, and should always be considered, two very different things.
Carragher also bemoaned England’s naivety in his aforementioned column, saying of Italy specifically that “they are streetwise, they know how to deal with situations. Their defenders mark you so tight at set-pieces that it feels as if they are in your boots. They give cute fouls away. They know how to win.” It’s a fair point, and arguably the most streetwise team of them all, Portugal, have just won the European Championship, yet it begs the question: is Allardyce really the coach to instil that? A man who once said of foreign players that “They make a big fuss about it and that’s what they do. That’s mostly foreign players, they do make a big fuss of it. That’s in their nature.”, before going on to proudly state that “they react in a more volatile way to incidents like that than
we do.”? It’s an especially scary prospect given that FA chief-executive Martin Glenn recently suggested that “I want someone to come in to the England role to really work with not just the senior team but to make sure all the great work with the under-16s, 17s, 18s…to knit all that together” and to “make sure all the development teams are laddering up to something more effective.”.
Speaking of Glenn: he recently made the point that “the British press, like it or not, are probably the most intensely passionate about the game in the world and that has a spill over effect. The consequence of which is people probably play not to make a mistake, as opposed to play to win.”. Perhaps now we’re getting somewhere. After all, has one of the media’s highest profile number, Henry Winter, not previously admitted the following: “The players run out there with the white shirt weighing heavily on them. They worry about the critical headlines if they slip up, the sort of media storm that blew around Rob Green and his family after his mistake against the United States at the 2010 World Cup. One player confided to me that all he could think about in the tunnel before kick-off was what rating he might get in the next day’s papers…He hadn’t even kicked a ball and he was already concerned about the post-match fall-out.”.
Well it was Winter’s profession, if not Winter himself, who tormented Green after that game against the United States, Paul Robinson and Scott Carson against Croatia, David Beckham against Argentina, Gareth Southgate, Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle against Germany and, back when it was fashionable to criticise the manager, put the likes of Robson, Taylor, Eriksson and McLaren through as much hell as it’s possible to put a football manager. It’s utterly fucking lamentable to see one of them recognise that his own profession is a massive part of the problem, type it out, look at it, maybe proof-read it a couple of times and then go on his merry way without a care in the world, later publishing an article under the headline “England must stop cocooning spoilt players to succeed”.
Martin Glenn might not be a football expert, as he admits himself, but he does see that England’s players “play not to make a mistake, as opposed to play to win”. My solution would involve finding a way to remove the team from the 24/7 media shitstorm that surrounds England, but Glenn and his colleagues have devised a more unfortunate one. To hire a manager who plays percentage football designed to take as much risk out of the game as humanly possible, presumably so that the players don’t have to worry about mistakes anymore – “if in doubt, put it out” or “launch it”, right? Perhaps England fans will yet see a modern version of Jack Charlton’s Ireland team circa late-1980’s when, blessed with players of the calibre of Liverpool’s John Aldridge, Ray Houghton, Mark Lawrenson and Ronnie Whelan, former Arsenal and Juventus legend Liam Brady (albeit coming towards the end of his career), Manchester United’s Paul McGrath and Kevin Moran, and Arsenal’s David O’Leary, he implemented a style of play based largely on long balls to Tony Cascarino or Niall Quinn (Andy Carroll anyone?), balls in behind the opposition full-backs to Aldridge which meant that the most prolific centre-forward in English football didn’t break his international duck for 4 years, and stuck arguably the country’s greatest ever centre-back (McGrath) in midfield for a few years to accommodate Mick McCarthy. It’s just a pity that Chris Samba plays for Congo.
Hey, it might work, at least to the extent that such an approach may well have secured a win against Iceland. Beyond that, though, Allardyce, unless he possesses the kind of hitherto untapped levels of managerial ability that he once claimed make him equipped for the Real Madrid job, is unlikely to have enough tactical acumen or experience at the highest level, or be “streetwise” enough to use Carragher’s word, to improve substantially on what his predecessor did, namely qualify for a major tournament and then preside over an early exit once he gets there. In the meantime a squad of players which, on paper, is every bit the equal of its Italian counterpart that reached the quarter-final of Euro 2016 and ran Germany desperately close, with a centre-forward who often lost out to Shane Long at club level last season (Pelle) and a player that “Big Sam” himself has recently sold from Sunderland (Giaccherini) leading their attack, will continue to labour when the pressure comes on. Allardyce’s appointment won’t change that, all it will do is satisfy the media’s craving for an English manager.
I certainly don’t agree with the view that these English players are “soft”, a word which, to me, has certain connotations not a million (or even a handful of) miles removed from the same kind of rhetoric that drove Brexit. Not that I’m accusing Carragher of parroting that nonsense, although his apparent derision at the idea of football academies does carry an unfortunately backwards undertone. He’s simply misguided, like so many others, and sometimes that can be just as bad. It just feels like the same inward-looking, nostalgic, harking back to the “good old days” of Terry Butcher’s bloody bandage and ‘Psycho’ Pearce acting the, well, psycho after that penalty against Spain, that tackle by Moore or when Lineker scored, Bobby belting the ball…ugh, I’ll stop that before I get sick…bullshit that reduces everything to black or white, hard or soft, in or out.
The sensible, and brave, decision was to avoid that kind of rhetoric
like the plague. It’s what got Hodgson the job in the first place and prompted possibly the worst piece of writing I’ve ever seen from an English football journalist (whose surname wasn’t Samuel and first name wasn’t Martin) in June when one of them, Michael Henderson, stated that: “When Raheem Sterling retires at night in his £3 million fortress in Prestbury, the Cheshire village which serves as a barracks for the Manchester light infantry, it’s a fair bet he doesn’t mug up on the literature of Latin America. It would be interesting to know whether he has actually read a book at all.”
There’s a bizarrely poisonous couple of sentences for you, a relatively short time removed from another journalist, Jeff Powell, interpreting Sterling’s fatigue prior to a European Championship qualifier in Estonia as “a player who had announced himself too tired to give his all for his country” and suggesting that “it is worth drawing to Master Sterling’s attention that younger men than he fight and die for this country.” Later on in his reign, the England manager himself said of Daniel Sturridge, another of England’s best and brightest talents, that “it was important for me to test his resolve a little bit…and I am delighted he did get out there, even though he maybe didn't feel 100 per cent, because that means in future I will know I can trust him as an England player and he is not going to be playing when he feels like it”. So, to summarise: Sterling is illiterate, or at least uninterested in Latin American literature, and possibly unworthy of living near the Manchester light infantry (because why else mention it?), while Sturridge is simply lazy and untrustworthy.
These are two players that Brendan Rodgers, who will likely never become a top manager, used to good effect in ransacking the Premier League a few seasons back, something which, even if you were inclined to agree with Hamann’s Iceland post-game comments, shows how effective the duo can be. Allardyce, if he has any sense, should be looking to build his team around them. At the very least, one can bend stunners in with the outside of his boot in the Europa League finals and the other has pace to burn, a key attribute given the importance of getting to the line and around the back of defenders who may very well be hitting and hurting you, wise words from another former Liverpool and “England man” a couple of years before he started being mercilessly booed by his own fans for no apparent reason, possibly because they thought he was lazy, untrustworthy and uninterested in the works of Pablo Neruda. And quite possibly “soft”.
This is the point to which England is wilfully regressing.
