This is a public health warning: some of you should remove any sharp implements nearby because what follows is a defence of Sam Allardyce, football manager. It's not a popular calling, this. Selling An Phoblacht at a DUP conference might be less fraught.
True blue Evertonians began the week embarrassed by the performance at Southampton and the general mismanagement of their club from the boardroom. Dread kicked in on Monday when it seemed Allardyce, not Marco Silva or some other "progressive" appointment, was about to be made. When confirmation of Allardyce came on Wednesday, widespread squirming and anger replaced that dread.
How can a club which still thinks of itself in "school of science" terms employ a man once offered £50 by his manager at Bolton to burst a ball in a tackle?
“I tried and tried,” Allardyce said.
That was almost 50 years ago, but Big Sam has never quite been able to leave that image behind. He is English football's bulldozer, someone who thinks Zeitgeist is the left-back at Eintracht Frankfurt. If Cluedo did football, Allardyce would have killed the beautiful game from the dugout with a long ball.
The blunt instrument: on good days he is referred to as Fireman Sam, a manager who will come in, deal with the flames and stop your house from burning down. Actually it is meant as a dig, an ironic compliment, as if the ability to fight fires was not an attribute.
Fireman
There is nothing wrong with being a fireman, not in real life, nor in football management. It requires vision, quick wit and the sense to prioritise. In his last two club posts in particular – Sunderland and Crystal Palace – Allardyce has demonstrated these capacities again.
Allardyce took over Sunderland two years ago last month with the club having scratched out three points from its first eight Premier League games. They were going down.
Dick Advocaat was the manager. Advocaat described the Sunderland squad as "simply not good enough" and walked away. In the next eight games, under Allardyce, Sunderland won nine points.
It was an improvement but they were still in the bottom three. Then came January and three good signings: Lamine Kone, Wahbi Khazri and Jan Kirchhoff. All fitted, or were made to fit, so that from February 6th – the last 14 games of the season – Sunderland won four, drew eight, lost two.
What's more, on the night Sunderland secured survival – easily defeating Roberto Martinez's folding Everton – Allardyce's team played good football. He had turned Younes Kaboul from nonchalant into committed, Patrick van Aanholt from difficult into dangerous. Allardyce had reorganised and re-energised Sunderland.
Similarly, last Christmas when he joined Palace the team had six wins from its previous 36 Premier League matches under Alan Pardew. Allardyce was inheriting a squad that contained talent but which was not maximising it.
Palace had 15 points from 17 games. From the next 17, they gathered 24 points. Under Allardyce, Palace won at Chelsea and Liverpool, they beat Arsenal 3-0 at home. They stayed up comfortably.
Successor
He signed Van Aanholt from Sunderland, where his successor David Moyes did not or could not handle him.
Allardyce signed Mamadou Sakho from Liverpool, where Jurgen Klopp did not or could not handle him. Both defenders contributed to Palace's renewal.
This is Allardyce's most relevant work. He has been lumped in with Moyes, Pardew and Roy Hodgson this week, but Allardyce's recent achievements out-strip that trio's by a distance.
So that is not the best comparison: if seeking one with another manager who has made such a fast and high impact in his last two posts, Marco Silva would be better.
Had Silva been announced prior to Everton's slightly fortunate 4-0 victory over Moyes's West Ham on Wednesday, there would have been less gnashing of teeth at Goodison Park. Silva is seen as the future.
Allardyce is the past. He is viewed as old school, even if Alex Ferguson calls him "ahead of his time" and "astute".
None of this may be enough at Everton, however. There Allardyce has the opportunity once and for all to kill the Allardycus Rex image with an Allardici dagger. He has money, time and a squad that finished seventh last season – 15 points above eighth.
It should be his moment. Yet even if he brings structure and victories to Everton, there will be some who cannot have him.
This is not to be overlooked. Although Allardyce protests about the absence of chances for British managers, he is onto his seventh Premier League club. At two of them, Newcastle United and West Ham, he failed to win over the fanbase. Big Sham, the Geordies called him, while Hammers fans embraced their mutual separation at the end.
Public image
Style of football was the overriding concern, but the impression of dubious financial propriety which hangs around Allardyce, and which saw him lose the England job, is also a factor in his public image. He has not chosen advisers well, some would say; he might counter that those advisers have made him a multimillionaire.
Money and esteem matter to someone who grew up on the Old Park Farm estate in Dudley, where there was no telephone at home and the undiagnosed dyslexic struggled at school.
He wanted to be Derek Dougan playing up front for the Wolves; he became a rugged centre-half asked to burst balls.
Ever since then he wanted to be accepted as a progressive manager at a club with a puncher’s chance. Newcastle and West Ham offered that, and some. But Big Sam did not fit, and once the criticism came he did not want to fit.
At Everton, for both parties’ sake, he must show not only that he deserves to fit, but that he wants to.
EVERTON’S ‘BIGGEST’ GAME
On a wet Friday night at Goodison Park just over a month ago, a few dozen diehards listened to a man called Gareth Farrelly – you may have heard of him – tell his Everton story.When last Sunday Martin Keown said the midweek game against West Ham was the biggest in Everton's history, many Evertonians will have smiled, Farrelly included.
Farrelly made only 20 starts for Everton, scoring two goals, but one of those is celebrated still. It came on the last day of season 1997-98 when Everton were bound for relegation unless they bettered Bolton’s result at Chelsea.
Thanks to Farrelly’s first goal for the club, Everton drew with Coventry, while Bolton lost. Goodison has never forgotten, even if Keown has.
It did not guarantee Farrelly a place, though. The following year he was sold to Bolton Wanderers, who had a new manager. Farrelly was his first signing.
His name? Sam Allardyce.
