Sam Allardyce is a creature of contradictions, painted as northern despite coming from the Midlands and so eager to self-aggrandise he makes it more difficult to appreciate him. And JohnnyTheNic is happy to see him back.
Samuel Allardyce is the 68-year-old, 6ft 3ins manager of Leeds United, at least for the next four games. Often portrayed as northern by the geographically illiterate, he is obviously from Dudley, which is nowhere near the north.
Now in the big league he set about making Bolton play the sort of long ball, aggressive football he played as a defender, but with a bit of imported flair. In the first two Premier League seasons they finished 16th and 13th. There followed the four seasons that have come to define him when the club finished eighth, sixth, eighth and sixth and made the last 32 and last 16 in the UEFA Cup.
All the same, people who have worked with him on the radio attest to his good humour and even self-deprecation, as hard as that may be for some to believe of a man who described Nigel Farage as “a forthright, forward-speaking, intelligent man”. Imagine thinking that. Imagine saying it on national television.
The Alpha Male, perhaps especially in football, is probably a declining force, but you still see them, like when Sean Dyche was joshing with John Terry before the Everton game at the weekend. There’s always this sort of amused passive-aggressive self-satisfaction about them but which also seems very close to ‘can’t you take a joke, mate?’ and a push in the solar plexus. Allardyce fits into that world perfectly.
It’s easy to say how good you’d be at something in the full knowledge you’ll never have to prove it. But it is something else entirely to massage all this disinformation, the delusions and grievances into a persecution complex where English managers are discriminated against and have all but been outlawed in their own land, which is the essence of what our man said in an especially hang-dog ‘poor-me’ interview on BeIn with the Toxic Twins.
But however you feel about Allardyce, he is box office. Football needs its characters, whether they are angels or devils – they are important drivers of the ongoing soap opera. Many will be hoping that he comes good one more time and saves Leeds from the drop; many will be hoping he makes a total fool of himself in what we must now call, Frank Lampard-style.
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