On the final day of the 2020-21 Premier League season, West Brom travelled to Elland Road, relegated and broken. They had gone six games without a win and had lost three on the spin. In front of home supporters for the first time in a top-flight match for 17 years, Leeds scored three times before a late consolation goal that fell foul of the Trade Descriptions Act.
Leeds finished in ninth. West Brom, then managed by Sam Allardyce, have not returned.
Did anyone really think that Leeds United and Allardyce would meet again so soon and with such bizarro friendliness? That this club, who had finally found an identity under Marcelo Bielsa, would arrive at the button marked ‘BigSamismo’ less than two years later?
For all that Leeds are inherently wedded to their own calamity, this might just set a new record. Allardyce is Seth Johnson’s contract offer for Generation Z. This isn’t 4D chess; it’s 2D Buckaroo.
Do you think even he saw this coming? Asked on his “No Tippy Tappy Football” podcast (I promise, all of these things are true) in February, Allardyce told Leeds that they knew where he was, urged them to call him and reiterated that he wouldn’t turn it down, but that was nothing more than mild self-bantering and the increasingly distant dream of a man who would rather be managing in football than talking into a microphone about it.
We came up with Bielsa and we might go down with Allardyce.
If there is anything else that best personifies how the Premier League laughs at your fine intentions before ripping them up, how it breaks your spirit, how it makes fools out of princes, it is Leeds United’s slow descent from their own tactical ideals.
Marching on together? They’re barely walking, a mass of splinter groups and cliques.
If the answer is Allardyce in 2023, what is the question? Who would have been a good option five years ago? Who is the perfect guest on the Keys and Gray podcast? Something something a pint of wine? But really, it comes down to this: name a manager who isn’t called Javi Gracia. Leeds already broke the “in case of emergency” glass and now all they have are cuts on their hands.
Such is the strength of Allardyce’s personality, it feels as if he is perennially lingering in the shade just out of shot, either just coming out of a job or just about to get one.
He is always able to explain how he would have done better, how foreign managers have made English football boring to watch despite the increase in goals (yes, actually, look it up), how all Club X needs is the Allardyce dance move – one arm around the shoulder while the foot kicks you squarely up the arse.
But that hasn’t been true for a long while now. Allardyce might appear as the regular sat in the corner of the Premier League Arms, but he has managed 28 matches in the past five years.
All of those were at West Brom, where he took over a team two points from safety, won four games and left them relegated by 13 points. Even if you can make valid caveats about the state Slaven Bilic left West Brom in, this was no rescue mission.
That reflects Allardyce’s diminishing influence and use. Once he was the relegation zone’s bat signal, the king of the English manager’s lunch club.
Now Allardyce is the equivalent of pouring white wine on the red wine stain on the carpet: you’re less than convinced that it will fix the mess and you suspect the solution might be a bit of a myth but the carpet is ruined anyway so you can’t really make it worse.
There is no reason for this to work. Leeds’ fixtures are horrible, their form is horrible, Allardyce has very little time to work with and has a “no-strings-attached” relationship where he will be employed purely for the next four matches.
It is long-termism that is supposed to pay out double, not the desperate scrabble through a League Managers’ Association handbook from 2015. This should be the epitaph on Leeds’ top-flight stay, not their rescue.
And yet, and yet, and bloody yet. You see the glint in the eye and the smile. You hear “The boys are back in town” playing from a speaker down the hallway. You can picture Richard Keys’ face as he shouts “Welcome back big man” down his smartphone. You wonder if making life difficult for the opposition is enough of an upgrade to halt a slide.
You can’t persuade yourself that this might ever work. But you cannot allow your pride to precede your fall if you claim categorically that it will not. Big Sam rides again in 2023. And nothing makes sense any more.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/A03eoXj
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