Sam Allardyce being appointed Everton manager is a backwards step for a club that should be going forward
The Toffees wanted Watford's impressive young boss in the dugout but had to be opt for second best, simultaneously proving the same school of English managers will always get jobs
SAM ALLARDYCE fell in love with himself at an early age and has since proved loyalty in football does still exist.
When it comes to self-regard, he is ardently faithful.
So it was little surprise when, after taking over at Goodison Park, the former England manager had a pop at Watford’s Marco Silva, the bloke Everton really wanted.
“Marco Silva’s track record has got no comparison with mine,” said Allardyce. “He got Hull City relegated last season.”
Except Silva didn’t really, because Hull were dead and buried when the young Portuguese manager replaced Allardyce’s mate Mike Phelan and Silva made such a good fist of attempting to save them that three Premier League clubs wrestled over his signature this summer.
And then when Everton sacked Ronald Koeman, they wanted 40-year-old Silva so much they waited in vain for a month.
Allardyce wasn’t Everton’s first-choice because — and we know this as he keeps telling us — British managers are an endangered species.
This despite Allardyce, Alan Pardew, David Moyes, Roy Hodgson, Mark Hughes and Tony Pulis having held 29 different Premier League managerial posts without winning a trophy or qualifying for the Champions League group stages.
Still, they’re pretty much giant pandas, these blokes.
Fireman Sam, like many of the others on that list, is considered a relegation escapologist.
And while he has never been relegated with his six previous Premier League clubs, when Allardyce was a couple of years older than Silva is now he took a job at a seemingly-doomed Notts County in the third tier and oversaw an 18-match winless run before they were relegated.
It didn’t make him a useless manager, though. He isn’t. It’s just that he needed a job.
These days, with a fortune to his name due to the pay-offs which accompanied his sackings, Allardyce doesn’t have to take impossible jobs like that one, or Silva’s stepping-stone gig at Hull.
Allardyce has kept up Blackburn, West Ham, Sunderland and Crystal Palace but none were in as desperate a position as Hull — a dysfunctional club with wantaway owners, a skeleton squad and boycotting fans.
Of course, Everton’s board and supporters would have preferred Silva because his teams are far more watchable than Allardyce’s.
And after one win over West Ham just as he was being appointed and another in his first match at home to Huddersfield, it’s clear Everton panicked too soon.
This was supposed to have been a breakthrough season for an ambitious club with a wealthy investor in Farhad Moshiri.
Instead, Everton have acted as if Olly Murs has been sending out alarmist tweets about them.
Allardyce’s West Ham team was so difficult to watch they were booed off after winning.
Everton is the School of Science, the people’s club, now showing wanton disregard for its people.
They will finish in the top half — perhaps even seventh again — because Allardyce is competent and they spent a lot of money on some decent players, with a No 9 to replace Romelu Lukaku surely arriving in January.
But after Pulis being hounded out of West Brom, it’s a major backward step for a club of Everton’s reputation to appoint his blood brother.
They are meant to be bigger, and better, than Big Sam.
This promises to be a joyless diversion.
What a load of Clatt trap
PLENTY of men have been praised for their part in Leicester’s title miracle.
They include recruitment chief Steve Walsh, coach Craig Shakespeare, previous boss Nigel Pearson and the archaeologists who dug up King Richard III’s skeleton from beneath a Leicester car park.
So it was only a matter of time before Mark Clattenburg demanded recognition.
Why so? By refusing to send off any Tottenham players during the Battle of Stamford Bridge, a 2-2 draw which confirmed Leicester as champions.
Puzzled? Let Mark explain… “I allowed them [Tottenham] to self-destruct so all the media, all the people, went: ‘Tottenham lost the title’,” said Clattenburg on a podcast, recorded while he was apparently sober.
“If I sent three players off from Tottenham, what are the headlines? ‘Clattenburg cost Tottenham the title’. It was pure theatre that Tottenham self-destructed against Chelsea and Leicester won the title.
“I certainly benefited the game by my style of refereeing. Some referees would have played by the book; Tottenham would have been down to seven or eight players and probably lost and they would’ve been looking for an excuse. But I didn’t give them an excuse, because my gameplan was: let them lose the title.”
So, what if Spurs had won, thanks to Clattenburg’s keen sense of theatre, and Leicester had then blown it in the final couple of matches?
That’s of little concern to a maverick like Clattenburg.
After all, who wants a fuddy-duddy ref who plays by ‘the book’ — AKA the laws of football?
Seemingly not the Saudis, who are paying him half a million a year.
Taking the mic
FA chief executive Martin Glenn, who seems incapable of spotting a microphone without saying something stupid into it, says Gareth Southgate will remain as England boss even if they are stuffed by Tunisia and Panama at the World Cup.
It’s not true. He knows it, we know it and Southgate knows it.
But despite the chaos Glenn has presided over, you have to admire his determination to carry on saying stuff right until he ends up back in charge of a frozen food company and all the microphones have gone.
SPURS’ downturn in results is surely in no way connected with boss Mauricio Pochettino’s behind-the-scenes book in which he criticised some of his players.
Just as it was coincidental that Glenn Hoddle’s England career went down the gurgler soon after he published his 1998 World Cup diary, and just as David O’Leary was axed by Leeds after releasing a book centreing on the Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate trial.
Because if it hadn’t been coincidence, someone would surely have advised against it.
Virtual hilarity
THE weirdos who allowed the ‘expected goals’ formula into football’s mainstream have just played into Arsene Wenger’s hands.
So it proved when the Gunners boss acknowledged ‘xG’ after his side defeated Manchester United by five expected goals to two on Saturday — despite losing the actual match by three actual goals to one.
Wenger won a hatful of imaginary trophies for finishing fourth and can now enjoy imaginary goals and imaginary wins with the full blessing of those people on the internet.
LIVERPOOL have refused national radio coverage of tonight’s Champions League clash with Spartak Moscow.
So if you can’t afford BT Sport, you must tune into the club’s cheerleading website.
It’s the top of the slippery slope where big Premier League clubs, paranoid about independent coverage, take it all in-house to hit dissenting voices.
Neutral coverage is something you will miss only when it’s no longer there. If you want a sneak preview, visit Australia during an Ashes series.
THE more you watch cricket’s Decision Review System, the more you realise that technology in decision-making just means it is a different bloke doing the guessing.