England boss Sam Allardyce will make Manchester City outcast Joe Hart feel wanted again

JOE HART will be in safe hands this week. Sam Allardyce will see to that.

No matter whether Big Sam keeps him as England No 1 or not come Sunday and Slovakia, he will look after him in an emotional sense.

Not that Joe will be handled with kid gloves. The World Cup qualifier is Sam’s first game as the Three Lions manager and he will want to mark his debut with a win.

So Hart, like everybody else in the squad, will have fierce demands put upon him in a mental sense as well as in a physical one.

But for all his hardman image Sam is above anything else a human being. He will be well aware of how difficult life has suddenly become for Hart.

One minute he is first choice for Manchester City and for his country. Next, at least as far as his club is concerned, he is bombed out.

That kind of situation can have a devastating effect but if he was to go anywhere looking for a bit of TLC it would be with Sam.

Were there a degree for football psychology Sam would not only be top of the class, he would be the professor.

I’ve known Sam for years — both playing against him and pitting my wits against him when I was boss of Middlesbrough and West Brom.

We’ve had many a glass together and what has always impressed me about him is the way he thinks not just about the game, but in the way he handles his players.

Thought, care even, goes into everything with him. Sure, when I was a kid coming through at West Brom he was a scary character when you were up against him.

Believe me, he would smash through you. No question. Yet what I discovered about him later was how seriously he took the mental side of the game with regards to every one of his team.

Sam is well known as a stats king. He was one of the first here to use performance read–outs to rate productivity and effectiveness. What is far less appreciated about him is that he can use his head to get into your head.

Stats are one thing. Knowing how a player feels, reading his body language to assess how he is feeling inside, is something else.

These have been pretty desperate days for Hart, who looks poised to end his City nightmare by signing on loan for Italian outfit Torino. But with England, Hart will be made to feel secure and welcome.

It may be that Joe won’t get the nod on Sunday but if that is the case it will be for his own good. Sam will know you don’t get 63 England caps for nothing.

He will not, however, just throw Hart in and hope for the best — and maybe condemn him to a bad game that would hurt his reputation, one that has already suffered quite a bit at the Euros.

It will not only be the City keeper who Sam will be looking closely at in a mental sense — it will be the whole squad. And if he doesn’t like what he sees, he will make some hard calls.