Sam Allardyce clings to hope amid desperate circumstances at Sunderland
Sunderland are second-bottom in the league and have just sacked their best player, leaving ‘Fireman’ Sam’s record of never having been relegated under threat
Sam Allardyce signals on the touchline.
Sam Allardyce is extremely proud of a record that is unblemished by a single relegation.
Down by the river Wear the sirens are wailing, the blue lights cannot seem to stop flashing and “Fireman Sam” acknowledges he is in real peril of failing to live up to his moniker.
Sam Allardyce remains rightly proud of a managerial CV unblemished by the stain of a single relegation from the top tier but he now knows that, in accepting the Sunderland job last October, this record was placed under severe threat.
When the former Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn and West Ham manager strode into the Stadium of Light as Dick Advocaat’s successor he joked about being “a firefighter” but, privately, the 61-year-old felt mid-table security should be well within his grasp.
Five months on he finds himself enmeshed in the sort of situation that aspiring young coaches studying crisis management might find themselves facing during a particularly grisly role-play exercise.
His struggling club has just sacked one of its most gifted, if sometimes underachieving, creators after that player shocked directors by pleading guilty to a charge of sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl and another of grooming. As if the termination of Adam Johnson’s contract on Thursday evening was not enough of an upheaval for Allardyce he must prepare his stunned squad for Manchester United’s visit on Saturday lunchtime.
A day after the prosecution at Bradford crown court detailed its case against the former England winger – who went on trial on Friday after denying two further charges of sexual activity with a child – Sunderland will kick off against Louis van Gaal’s side in desperate need of points.
Second-bottom, four points adrift of 17th-placed Newcastle and with their manager stressing the importance of not being cast any further adrift, they have little margin for error. “It’s now or never,” says Allardyce. “The longer you go without a win, the more pressure piles on you. The greater the pressure, the more likely it becomes that the lads can’t handle it.”
Considering Sunderland had still to win a league game this season when Advocaat resigned, claiming the team was simply “not good enough” to avoid falling into the Championship, Allardyce has arguably not done too badly. In 17 League matches he has registered five victories but, perhaps crucially, only two draws. The last point came at Liverpool last Saturday where Johnson stepped off the bench to score with a free-kick. Few suspected it would be his final appearance in a Sunderland shirt.
Yet as he sits at the club’s Wearside training ground, nursing a cold and shivering slightly, “Fireman Sam” refuses to feel sorry for himself and is creditably self-critical.
“Have I underachieved since I’ve been here?” muses a manager who has experimented with an eclectic assortment of formations and personnel combinations. “I haven’t got us out of trouble yet. Could I have done more? Maybe. Every manager tries to get the best out of their players but if those players don’t do what’s expected you do what I did in January – you move into the transfer market. I got four in [Wahbi Khazri, Dame N’Doye, Jan Kirchhoff and Lamine Koné] … but I was hoping to get more from the players already here.
“We’ve failed in defence more than anywhere else. We’ve conceded too many goals and not got enough clean sheets. From my viewpoint, that’s the biggest failure. Individual mistakes have cost us dearly. We try to show the players their responsibilities out of possession but they find that very difficult to cope with.”
Which all rather vindicates Advocaat’s argument. Allardyce, who arrived on a mission to “prove Dick wrong” but soon found himself devoting endless hours to working on individual defenders’ “basic body shape” and positioning, offers a wintry smile when asked whether his predecessor had been right all along. “I suppose my honest answer would have to be that, if I thought we were good enough, I wouldn’t have entered the market,” he says. “It’s been a big relief that, even having just arrived from abroad, the new players have already shown they’ve got some real talent.”
Perhaps history is poised to repeat itself. After all, in recent seasons Paolo Di Canio, Gus Poyet and Advocaat each defied considerable odds to keep Sunderland in the Premier League courtesy of 11th-hour “miracles”.
Allardyce remains confident he can avoid becoming the odd man out. “I’ve never felt I can’t keep us up – even when we lost five on the trot I always believed we could survive,” he says. “We keep losing control and letting opponents kill us but there’ve been glimpses of this team being capable and, every year about now, somebody in trouble always goes on a good run. You can never tell but it’s been us in the past and I hope it’s going to be us again.”
Outside, the thermometer is dropping towards freezing and the weak February sun has dipped low in the sky but, finally, he is smiling. In his mind Allardyce is on the steps of an aeroplane that has just landed in the restorative warmth of Arabia and his senses feel re-energised by the balmy desert breeze.
“We’re going to Dubai next week,” he says. “When the players come back they’ll be fitter, physically and mentally. It’ll be 75 degrees and they’ll need T-shirts and factor 25 rather than 16 jumpers, a hat and a scarf. It’ll make them feel good and, if they feel good, you get more out of players. Hopefully, Dubai will bring us extra points.”
Guardian
