Allardyce at Leeds: Big Sam’s back in the Premier League – and it was like he never left - The Athletic 3/5/23

By Phil Hay

They think they have seen it all at Leeds United — genuinely seen it all — but when was the last time they heard their manager having a pop at the UK’s judiciary?

Long story short: Sam Allardyce (for it is he) wants long-time lieutenant Sammy Lee on his staff now he has the Leeds job. Lee is involved in jury service, though, so Allardyce can’t have him. Lee is 64 years old, the criminal justice system is fairly important but Allardyce thinks the judge who won’t release him has “left him unemployed”, notwithstanding the fact that Leeds constitutes a four-game posting, a gig for three and a half weeks. Allardyce isn’t overly diplomatic. “I find that to be very, very poor judgement indeed,” he says.

This is 12 minutes into Allardyce’s press conference, his first after agreeing to fight the fire Leeds have conspired to light in their own house. Before he even gets onto Lee, the experience is like Allardyce’s greatest hits, like a man who has never been away or changed one iota in the time that he has spent out of football.

If you had forgotten him or if the memory was blurred, then you remember him now, that thick-skinned confidence of saying what he thinks and not worrying about how it reads. Soon, he’ll tell us he’s as good as Pep Guardiola, and he’s not joking.

He knows what he’s doing, though, because he has been around the game for decades and he has ample practice in working the media. Inevitably, the questions move onto Allardyce’s persona, the caricature which has him down — fairly or unfairly, pick your side — as a 68-year-old who is not what modern football wants to see when it looks in the mirror. Fashions have changed, the game has moved on and it is never lost on Allardyce that he is spoken about in those terms, as one of yesterday’s men.

“Far too many people think I’m old and antiquated, which is so far from the truth,” he insists. “I may be 68 and look old but there’s nobody ahead of me in football terms. Not Pep, not Klopp, not Arteta. It’s all there with me. In terms of knowledge and depth of knowledge, I’m up there with them. I’m not saying I’m better than them but certainly as good as they are.”

It is the Sam Allardycio reference, the feeling he has always had that a sexier exterior would have earned him sexier jobs. “There, I’ve given you a headline,” he jokes, and not by accident. At a stroke, Allardyce-on-a-par-with-Pep gives the rest of a club — players, board members — a day off from appearing in them.

He likes to rep the old guard and he throws in a little dig at the Crystal Palace supporters who grew tired of Roy Hodgson a couple of years ago, only to see him return in an interim role this season and put their relegation fears to bed immediately. And that is the take Allardyce has at Leeds, albeit with far steeper levels of urgency and much less wiggle room.

He thinks he can make a difference to a team who are 17th, on 30 points, and have four matches to play. He thinks he can tighten them up at the back and has noticed that while Leeds are not bad with the ball “there’s a massive problem out of possession”. And you know he will start there, even though his remark that a two per cent improvement in every player would equate to a 22 per cent improvement across the pitch is not strictly accurate in a mathematical sense.

It is plain he will pay close attention to who in the squad is coping with the pressure, who is fragile — the balance of confidence levels. But he’s not giving the vibe that he thinks he’s definitely got this. “It’s just too early to tell,” he says. “All I can do is hope for the right reaction.”

Allardyce was in at 7am on Wednesday, back at 100 miles an hour after almost two years out of management. How to get back into it cold from a standing start? “It’s the adrenaline when you walk in, isn’t it?,” he says and while his body language is not making it look like he has crawled over broken glass to get here, you can tell he is quietly delighted to be “back in the big time” as he puts it; mixing it, chewing the fat, shooting the breeze. He says he has “never moved so quickly in my life to take a position. Yesterday, a Zoom call. Here I am.”

His previous job, at West Bromwich Albion, went wrong, ending in relegation from the Premier League, but he makes a fair point about that. It was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and because of the related rules designed to slow the spread of the virus, clubs could not operate as they would normally have been able to, face-to-face contact restricted, nobody free to do as they pleased, everything disparate. Even press conferences were done on Zoom and he jokes about that when he shakes hands with people at the end of yesterday’s. Taking the West Brom job in the first place, he reflects, “was a bad decision by me”.

Day one for him at Leeds has been a training session and conversations with the players, a chance for them to tell him what they think might make them better. Over the next 48 hours, he will try to drill tactical thoughts into them and it goes by the predicted script when he says that “the goalie and the back four are the priority”.

They almost have to be. Leeds conceded a Premier League record 23 goals last month and have let in 67 in their 34 league games so far this season. And they’ve got Manchester City away next. “It’s a nice easy one on Saturday,” he says. ” But it has been done. Brentford did it. Brentford won there (last November). Shocks do happen.”

The biggest shock for him was that Leeds called him at all. Whatever Allardyce seeks from management now — longer opportunities or shorter blasts like this one — he assumed that, with a month to go, the Premier League was done with managerial switches until next season.

And in reality, it should have been. Leeds had no intention of taking emergency measures so late.

Allardyce wishes he had more games to go at. He’s aiming for six points from the four to come. “It’s a hard challenge, but somebody had to do it,” he says, which is basically how it is. “I’d have liked it to be longer. We need to pull off a surprise win from somewhere.”

This is so obviously him in his element that the wish for more time might be two-fold: more games to keep Leeds up, certainly, but probably the realisation that he’ll be getting the taste for management again just as this job ends at home to Tottenham on May 28.

Could he last for longer here? “Never say never,” Allardyce replies, and it should never be said that he carries himself with a lack of self-assurance. Leeds need a better squad anyway, he remarks. “If I stayed on, I wouldn’t want to be in a relegation dogfight from the very start.” So no, he won’t be begging for it.

But then, Allardyce does not really need to beg for anything. This is a free hit for him. If Leeds stay up, he takes credit — and a nice bonus. If they go down, he will ask what he was supposed to do? It is an odd juxtaposition of a coach in a no-lose situation batting for a club who have it all on the line and it is not easy to tell if, in this four-game shootout, those opposites will attract.

Allardyce says keeping Leeds up with so little of the race left would be as big an achievement as any of his.

Leeds wait anxiously to see the weight of his impact, crossing their fingers that they are more than a footnote on his CV when they come out the other side.