Sam Allardyce’s England will still have no world-class players but at least he will make the Three Lions finally roar
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ONE thing you can be sure about with Sam Allardyce is that he will not take any s***.
The FA have not appointed a ‘yes’ man. They have gone with someone who will do things his own way as England boss.
I crossed enemy lines in November to meet Big Sam at Sunderland’s training ground for an interview for Football Focus.
Then, I found out how supremely confident he is, how he is not afraid to take people on and how he does not care about reputations.
If a player is performing, he will play them. But if they are not playing well, they won’t be picked.
And the England players will definitely respect Sam because if they don’t — they will be out. It’s as simple as that.
I have always said that managing England is not rocket science. You have to create a happy environment, which I’m sure he’ll do.
You’ve got to create a system and organise a team, which I’m also sure he’ll do.
And you’ve got to rid the Three Lions stars of the nagging fear that they seem to have when playing in a major tournament.
For me, that is one of the biggest challenges he will face, but hopefully Sam can do it.
He will certainly get the players to man-up and get them to cope with the press.
There has always been criticism of Sam’s style of play. But the way I see it, football is about winning and he plays to win — however it needs to be done.
If a football game has to be won in an ugly way, then he won’t be afraid to do just that.
If the ball has to go long, he won’t be afraid to get them to kick it long.
When I played for Newcastle against Allardyce’s Bolton, you knew that to get something out of the game, you would really have to earn it.
That’s how it should be, especially in a tournament.
Just look at how Euro 2016 panned out in France — it wasn’t pretty from anyone’s perspective.
Champions Portugal only won one match in 90 minutes.
They didn’t win the trophy by playing lovely, pretty football — and they’ve got arguably the best player in the world in their team.
Sam, though, also adapts to what he has. He has always got the best out of the resources available to him.
If he has got players that can play, he will get them playing.
You just have to look at some of his sides over the years.
At Bolton he managed the likes of Jay-Jay Okocha, Youri Djorkaeff and Gary Speed and adapted their style accordingly.
Most recently at Sunderland, he found a system that enabled Jermain Defoe to flourish up front on his own.
With England, Sam has now got better players than he has worked with for a long time. But I don’t think there are ANY world-class players in our team at the moment.
So just like with all his previous teams, Sam will have to work hard to get the best out of what he has at his disposal.
But he will be able to do that by having us organised and disciplined.
I speak to players who have been managed by him and the one thing they all say is how meticulous he is.
Our England players in France looked confused, as though they didn’t know what they were doing, but that will not happen with Sam in charge.
He will be so meticulous with his organisation of the side and the system that he wants to play.
There is no way England would have lost to Iceland at the Euros if Sam was in charge.
Crucially, I’m confident Sam will also pick players who are in form and are fit.
Picking crocks and out-of-sorts stars has been a big mistake England have repeated over God knows how many years.
Another thing Sam has got going for him is that it can’t get any worse from what we saw in the summer.
I know we won our ten qualifying games to qualify for the Euros, but in France we were bloody awful.
So we have got to take little baby steps again now.
You can’t just go from being as bad as we were to being brilliant. But Sam will undoubtedly be able to improve us from what we’ve seen.
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All in all, I am just really pleased that the FA have gone with an Englishman.
It would have been wrong to pick another foreign manager. It would have sent out all the wrong signals from FA bosses.
When it came down to it, there were probably only two viable candidates — and that was Sam or Steve Bruce.
And although I said in a previous column how I felt Steve should have been given a chance, the biggest thing for me was that the FA did not go down the foreign manager route again.
Now, just like every other England fan, I am just really hoping that Sam can be a huge success.