Sam Allardyce on his and Leeds United's future, squad demand, Marcelo Bielsa and Whites 'trick' - YEP 13/5/23

Sam Allardyce is about to step out at Elland Road as Leeds United manager and the 68-year-old has issued a clear overriding message ahead of the Newcastle United showdown.

Lee Sobot

Second-bottom Leeds have just three games to get themselves out of the Premier League drop zone, starting with today’s enormous clash against third-placed visitors Newcastle United in a 12.30pm kick-off.

Allardyce held his pre-match press conference ahead of the game on Thursday afternoon which also featured the regular embargoed section for questions from the weekend papers at the end. The section was some 15-minutes long and here is everything that Allardyce said, with the simple but crucial need to stay up the clear and overriding theme.

Question: When you look at the squad that you have got and the way this club is set up, are you confident that this club will move in the right direction next season if you keep them up and will also be reasonably set to try and come back up if they go down, looking at the set up, the squad, the profile of the squad, the age, the talent?

Allardyce: "I would actually love to be able to answer that question for you because it's a very very good question. But I haven't had a minute to even think about that. This is only the end of my second week.

"I think if the ultimate happens and we don't mention the r word then you have got to remember this squad is only 18, it's not 25 and it could get back up again no problem. If other players are sold off then that will make it more difficult and next season it would have to improve obviously to increase the quality of the squad and the size of the squad.

"I don't know financially what that means to the club or what finances they have or would have available because it's not in the realms or being talked about at the moment. It's talking about survival and survival only."

Question: In terms of the actual football on Saturday, whenever people come to a Leeds game, it's always very entertaining with lots of drama and also exciting but they keep losing. And they can be crazy games, is the challenge for yourself to kind of take all of that out of this team?

Allardyce: "Not at all. Without creativity or without ability to break the opposition down, you won't win. So we'll have to balance the creativity to the defending. They can be as creative as they want when they have got possession. What they have to bear in mind is that if they lose it they have to do the job properly. That's all 11, not the goalie and the back four, that's everybody.

"So as we all know, the old saying is when we lose the ball there's 11 defenders and we win the ball there's 11 attackers so right from day one, the responsibility of when you lose possession and how you win it back and where do you win it back and how good are we at winning it back, that's the downside of the football club at the moment. Now, that doesn't stop you winning the ball and entertaining.

"That's just you lot that think that. It gives you more entertainment value, the quicker you win the ball back and the more often you win it back because what do you get? You get more possession and if you get more possession you can be more entertaining."

Question: What does the squad lack in terms of individuals?

Allardyce: "It lacks confidence at the minute. It hasn't got a match winner in terms of the best match winner in this country at the moment. It hasn't got anything like what Man City have got up front to just talk about the extreme.

"So what we need is we need a lot of the players to be able to take a chance if it comes their way because I can't rely on. I could rely on Jermaine Defoe at Sunderland. He got me out of trouble because he scored 18.

"Here, I think we have to share it. Midfield have to take responsibility to score a goal, the front three have to take responsibility to score a goal and certainly the defenders on set pieces have to take the responsibility to score a goal because 31 per cent of goals are scored from set plays so if you get one don't waste it."

Question: You say about the side’s confidence and resilience...

Allardyce: "I think the confidence is getting better if training is anything to go by and the mood of the players is anything to go by. We try to get it more enjoyable, but serious at the right times."

Question: How do you go about that in a short time?

Allardyce: "What you want is a reaction like everybody else. You want a reaction like Roy had at Palace. I want one of them on Saturday. I want a performance that gives us the chance to win the game while we keep working on getting better and better and better. Roy must be sat there with a cigar on now. All the criticism he got about coming back as well. He's just proved everybody wrong again so hopefully I can do a bit of that and say 'well, you know, Sam came in at a difficult time but he got enough points to keep us up. Whether that will be the case or not, I can only hope what we do and what the players do is enough to keep Leeds in the league."

Question: Any tricks you have done?

Allardyce: "Yeah, giving them a day off instead of coming in every day like they did before. There's nothing better than brain space.

"The brain is the biggest maker of a Premier League footballer and always will be because the brain tells you how to use your skills and if your brain is not functioning properly, it won't use the skills you've got correctly. That's why you play in the Premier League."

Question: You had everyone on the pitch at the Etihad after the game, was that a deliberate thing to show you were all in this together?

Allardyce: "I thought it was an act that we should take up which Karl (Robinson) whispered in my ear and I agreed with. So it wasn't me. I was purely and utterly focused on the game and I thought it was a fantastic idea on the basis that we showed a bit of fight and we were certainly thankful for the support in that corner, even though we didn't give them a huge amount to cheer. But the best part of our game was the finish, the last 10 minutes which I think is always very important."

Question: You said last week it was about taking all the attention away from the players. Do you sense that this group is mentally strong enough to deal with a relegation run in of this intensity?

Allardyce: "They sorted it last year didn't they? It was a relegation run last year wasn't it? So they've seen it before and they've experienced it before so make sure you do the same this year as you did last year. Was it the last game last time last year?

"So they held on there and probably with all due respects to Brentford, my last game Tottenham is probably a bit more difficult than Brentford but we will wait and see. Who knows? We might win two on the trot and we might not need to win, who knows. But we will wait and see."

Question: The first goal. How important will it be for the crowd as well as to get them on side, likely to be a ferocious atmosphere?

Allardyce: "Absolutely. We need them don't we as a 12th man, as always. We need them as the 12th man and it would deflate everybody. We'd need some big ones to come back from going a goal down at Elland Road with the position that we're in. So that's how important it is to defend correctly and try and get a clean sheet because that's all part of the game and, like I said, if you do that correctly, you get more and more and more possession and you could put Newcastle under more and more pressure."

Question: Leeds obviously had 16 years outside the Premier League before coming back in glorious fashion under Bielsa. Now it's a difficult period. I just wondered how you have made of the recent history and how much of a blow would it be to go back down and indeed on the other side of the coin, what would it mean to keep them up to the club, to the city and the supporters?

Allardyce: "There's not every club I would have joined with four games to go in the Premier League if they would have rang me up and asked me. But because it's Leeds United, it was a quick decision that didn't take a lot of thought, even though my wife thought I was mental of course.

"But it's Leeds and if I can keep Leeds up then I'm doing a great job I think to the Premier League to have a club like Leeds in it. They have been out of it far too long. I watched or managed against all the players here and all the big players that were there at that particular time in the early 2000s and it has been out an awful long time since then and been through an awful lot of pain to get back which would be obviously wasted if we don't survive this year."

Question: What do you remember of Bolton when they went down - a long time ago. And also what do you take out of your own sort of successes, keeping Bolton up and Sunderland?

Allardyce: "Hey, just a minute, we finished in Europe two years on the trot at Bolton in the last three years. Give us a bit of credit, for goodness sake. I might be a saviour but I am a creator. I think that in four games, if I keep Leeds up, it's going to be the best one because of having more games at all the others.

"And I think trying to see the Leeds of old with the energy and the abilities they've got, coupled with a bit more defensive resilience under Bielsa is probably what I'm looking for on Saturday. Because I don't know where that's gone.

"Certainly not quite as buoyant and as entertaining as it was before. Mind, in saying that, his second year was a bit of a disaster wasn't it. But the first year I was at West Brom which was in the pandemic which was a disaster but I think he came down to the Hawthorns in about the second or third game and just blew us away so I know what some of the players here are capable of. I know all the players are not here anymore but a bit more of that 100 per cent effort and 100 per cent being able to outrun the opposition, which was one of Leeds' biggest strengths then."

Question: In your book you said that Newcastle was the right job at the wrong time, given how late in the day you've come here, is there an element of the same here?

Allardyce: "I don't know, I just think I just save the football club now, irrespective of what happened before or what's going to happen in the future. I'm just a man that tries to get you out of the mire here and see what happens after that. There's no expectations beyond and there can be no expectations beyond this because the only focus can be on this last three games. Whatever happens at the end of that can be discussed or talked about and agreed. Until then, we don't know what our fate is."

Question: How do you reflect all these years later on how it ended at Newcastle? Was it an impossible job looking back? Do you think you were treated harshly by the fan base?

Allardyce: "You get treated harshly by the fan base at Newcastle by the fact that if they don't consider that your team is good enough or playing, playing or creating enough results then then you get criticised.

"I have to say based on what we had to do and how much we had to evolve a squad, unknowing to us at the time we had to find players we didn't really want to bring to the club just to make the squad up. But to start with 18 points in the first 10 games I thought was pretty remarkable. But the sad thing is we lost Viduka and Owen and that was the biggest blow to me.

"If they'd have kept Viduka and Owen I'd have got through that season in the top half, I don't have any doubt about it. Because of their injury problems we couldn't keep them on the field which ended up with me moving on. But it is what it is.

"I think that Newcastle now are in a very very good place and the fans will be very happy with what they see and the sort of football that they are playing. But every manager gets criticised at Newcastle, even Sir Bobby Robson.

"He lost his job because they had a bad start to the season and nobody is adhered to more than him now at Newcastle and rightly so. But you get criticised when you're not doing as well as you should do in the fans' eyes, as you do anywhere else."

Question: Eddie Howe had better watch out then?

Allardyce: "We all have to watch out eventually. It depends how big the crowd is. If there's a bigger crowd and there's a bigger disappointment, there's a bigger disapproval.

"If you're at a smaller club with a smaller crowd the disapproval is there but less than at the bigger one. But if you have two skins, a rhino and an elephant, you cope with it, because you have to."