Allardyce for England manager?
The Independent’s Ian Herbert makes a case for Sam Allardyce to succeed Roy Hodgson as England manager.
|||To get to the very heart of the issue, what would we have wanted the next England manager to have done on Monday night? We want to know that he would not have ended the game against Iceland with four up front, and one of them Gary Cahill. That his defence would have been so drilled to defend Aron Gunnasrson's famous long throw that they would be taking up positions in their sleep, instead of allowing him a free missile. We would want to know that he would see that the withdrawing of his captain and all-time top goalscorer from a Slovakia group stage match which was no dead rubber invited disaster. That he would have watched Iceland in person and seen what the cameras can't show, rather than head off on a trip up the River Seine .
As someone wiser than me put it a few days ago: “Pick the right team in the right formation and give it a plan, you have a chance. If not you have an inquest.” Because England do have players.
The humourless, self-regarding culture of the national team needs sorting out, even though the haters do accuse you of character assassination when you describe it. But the next England manager does not need to rip up the squad list and start again.
It's why the notion of seeking Laurent Blanc, Arsene Wenger, or any other individual who might pass a Conservative Party points-based immigration test creates layers of complication that need not exist. Wenger will be offered a new Arsenal deal if they start the season well, we learned on Thursday. Blanc has won three championships in the weak French league and spent an Arabian fortune doing it. Guus Hiddink has a ring to it, except he failed abysmally with the Netherlands, Claudio Ranieiri satisfies our love of the next new thing, except he lost to the Faroe Islands with Greece. Germany put seven past Luiz Felipe Scolari.
You could have bet the house on Sam Allardyce getting the necessary done in Nice, Saint Etienne or Marseilles and, for what it's worth, not needing to ask his assistant to make telephone calls on the eve of a World Cup squad announcement, to see if Jamie Carragher and Paul Scholes fancied venturing out of retirement, as that £10m maestro Fabio Capello did in the summer of 2010.
Players love him, too. They just love him. That's not an insignificant factor when international football is the Premier League's poor relation. The more benign temperaments, the less benign temperaments: Allardyce seems to get things out of them. Nicolas Anelka, Youri Djorkaeff, El Hadji Diouff are just a few of the difficult souls he handled at Bolton but they work for him because he sets the parameters. They might not admit as much but they loved him for that.
The clue to what will make this a difficult one for Allardyce to win comes in that word Bolton. A town in northern England doesn't tend to fit the FA establishment test. The Midlands accent. The indelicate way with words. It just doesn't play well in the Home Counties.
But he is light years ahead of Gareth Southgate for powers of motivation, streets in front of Steve Bruce for tactical acuity and his reputation as a Red Adair of the relegation zone belies his work as a moderniser and early analytics crusader. He's curious, modern and happens to eff and blind a bit.
“A long ball man,” people will say, as if he would actually deploy Dele Alli, Raheem Sterling (whom he would reinvigorate) and Daniel Sturridge in that kind of business. To suggest so insults the man's intelligence.
They like him very much at Sunderland, where some extremely shrewd work in last winter's transfer market rescued the team from a near unavoidable doom, though it is hard to conceive of him passing up such an offer as this one.
When it comes to international football management, scouring the world for the best is not all about the money. Louis van Gaal took an average Dutch team to a World Cup third place and then tanked at Manchester United. Ranieiri, all-conquering in the public eye, was an international disaster zone and then soared at Leicester. The FA can spend a year looking for the manager it believes brings pedigree, international lustre and looks nice on the embossed stationery, or they can just get on with it and hire the nation's best candidate. – The Independent