Sam Allardyce sits in Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona apartment trying to convince him to move to Bolton.
He describes Bolton Wanderers’ first ever European campaign in the season ahead. How, in his view, the club have one of the most advanced off-field set-ups in football, better than Real Madrid or Barcelona; how it has helped them punch above their weight; and how, with Guardiola at their centre, Allardyce intends to keep punching.
Guardiola listens, intently. He is intrigued. He is in his mid-30s, close to retirement. Could this be his last move to a league that has always interested him?
The scene sounds outlandish 18 years later. But it wasn’t so at the time. Guardiola was easing towards retirement at Al-Ahli in Qatar.
He was mainly playing football, golf, relaxing and learning English. He loved English football and, though he wasn’t sure his physique would stand up to the brute strength of the Premier League, he had half a mind to give it one last shot there.
And there was Allardyce, “the Big Sam” as Guardiola would refer to him 11 years later in his first press conference as Manchester City manager, giving him the hard sell.
Allardyce had an in that he hoped might tip the balance: Fernando Hierro. A serial winner with Real Madrid, Hierro had helped Bolton to a miraculous sixth-place finish the season before and Allardyce felt Guardiola could replace him.
Guardiola had heard from Hierro and fellow Bolton team-mate Ivan Campo how much they enjoyed the lifestyle in England’s North-west.
Stuart Pearce, then manager of Manchester City, had offered Guardiola a six-month contract. And he spoke several times with Paul Jewell who tempted him with an offer at Wigan, before he eventually followed Juanma Lillo, a coach he considered a genius and wanted to learn from, to Dorados in Mexico.
“Pep’s one that got away,” Allardyce later reflected. But, somewhat surprisingly, they kept in touch. An unlikely bromance forming between Allardyce and a manager who should represent everything he dislikes about football: the “fancy-dan foreigners” who form the elite that have always, in his mind, looked down on him.
But Guardiola was different. Allardyce was surprised when they crossed paths later that he remembered the meeting in Barcelona. They would be perceived as polar opposites but if you examine their careers they share a common desire to prove people wrong.
When Guardiola arrived at Manchester City in 2016 it appeared to be the perfect match between a club with near-limitless resources and the world’s best coach about to sweep through English football, as he had done in Spain and Germany.
Yet Guardiola saw it differently. He was nervous. He felt he had much to prove, wanted to test himself – in a way he had not done in his playing days – in the harsh but alluring Premier League where doubters had said his tidy, intricate style of football would fail.
Who did he namecheck first in his very first press conference as City manager? Was it Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool, Antonio Conte at Chelsea, or his great rival Jose Mourinho across town at United? No, it was “The Big Sam,” of course.
Before he came to City, Guardiola had always loved the atmosphere in English stadiums when he visited first as a player then as a manager. But, by his own account, he had never attempted to win matches when it was frequently freezing cold and windy, or worked on Boxing Day in that unique English tradition.
Guardiola wanted to prove himself in those conditions, to show that his neat style of football could still operate in them, against coaches like the Big Sam.
Guardiola even paid his respects to the role Allardyce had played in shaping today’s game. “The people who are 35, 40, 45, we invent football or we create football? No, football was already created and these guys [like Allardyce] helped us to do it and that’s why,” he said last week.
You see, buried beneath the snobbery surrounding Allardyce’s appointment at Leeds, whose fight to beat relegation take them to Guardiola’s Manchester City on Saturday, is that he really was, once upon a time, one of the most innovative and pioneering managers.
The season before that summer when he sat in Guardiola’s apartment, Bolton beat Liverpool, Tottenham twice, and beat and drew with Arsenal.
“I was no longer some big lump from the Black Country, and a clogger of a centre-half,” Allardyce wrote in his autobiography, Big Sam.
“My staff and I were presiding over the best coaching set-up in the Premier League. Our performance director, Mike Forde, would research sports teams across the world, learning how they prepared and cherry-picking the best bits. The Milan lab was lauded as being the secret behind Italian football success, but I will happily bet we were better than them and better than Real or Barça.
“Yet the top clubs in England would not risk taking on me and my team. Nowadays they are rarely managed by anyone from Britain. They’ve got to get a fancy-dan foreigner in, it’s almost compulsory. Are they really any better than the coaches we produce in this country? Do they have more knowledge than we do? I doubt it. The idea that foreign coaches have a more in-depth approach to football is rubbish.”
He had convinced players such as Youri Djorkaeff, a World Cup and European Championship winner with France, and Jay-Jay Okocha, the entertaining Nigerian regarded as one of the best African players ever, to play for him.
But Allardyce has always felt the global football establishment (bar Sir Alex Ferguson) has looked down on him. He once stuck comments from Rafael Benitez on the changing room wall after the Spaniard complained that “They don’t play my type of football” following a Liverpool defeat.
Allardyce talks of being “on a mission to embarrass the powerhouses of English football”. “I was loving being in charge of a team that consistently over-achieved and upset the establishment by giving the elite a bloody nose,” he wrote.
“The more they slagged us off, the more we enjoyed getting under their skin. There is nothing more satisfying than punching above your weight against the bigger guys, knocking them out.
“We got tagged as a long-ball team because they were so embarrassed when they couldn’t beat us. When they hit a 50-yard ball it was a cultured pass; when we did, it was a hopeful hoof. I got used to it; they were having to find excuses for their own deficiencies.”
Though Guardiola should represent everything Allardyce rails against in football, there is mutual respect there. He marvelled at how Guardiola navigated his first Bayern Munich press conference in German after learning the language while on holidays. (Allardyce is utterly convinced he would have made it in Spanish football had he learned the language, something he didn’t do despite spending three decades holidaying there.)
Guardiola, meanwhile, once hailed Allardyce’s “genius” for his ability to keep teams up. “Sam Allardyce is a genius to take these teams when everyone believes it is over and get results,” Guardiola said in January 2021 ahead of meeting Allardyce’s West Bromwich Albion during his last attempted rescue mission.
“The results give you an incredible boost, an incredible confidence. What is first – do results make you play good, or do you play good if you get results?”
Allardyce’s West Brom were thrashed 5-0 by City. And having previously saved Everton, Sunderland and Crystal Palace, for the first time he couldn’t keep a team up. That magical aura had faded. It looked as though his managerial career was done before Leeds United called last week.
Fitting, then, that his first of only four games to avoid relegation comes against Guardiola’s Manchester City. A daunting prospect but the sort of challenge Allardyce loves.
One more opportunity to prove he is as good as he likes to tell everyone he is.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/XFQGvac
Post a Comment