Get It Kicked!: The Battle for the Soul of English Football by Jon Driscoll;

Author:Jon Driscoll;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mint Associates Ltd
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

6

The English style of play

‘WHEN DID the style of play outweigh the result? It’s a brainwash by all what’s happening outside of football. It’s a brainwash that we should only play this way.’

Sam Allardyce spoke to the Oxford Union, in 2020, explaining to some of the brightest young minds in the country why he has been unfairly traduced in the consciousness of the English football public.

‘The diversity of the Premier League is the reason we have the world’s best football league, the world’s best, there’s no doubt about that. To say we only play by playing the ball out from the back and nothing else, it brainwashes everyone into trying to play that way and if you haven’t got the players capable of playing like that you’ll fail and even if you say, “I’m trying to play the right way,” you will lose too many matches and lose your job.’

I don’t understand why managers with so much money in the bank are so afraid of the sack. With no financial worries, you can set up your team whichever way you believe is best. Allardyce has had more Premier League clubs than any other manager. His ability to quickly organise a team made him appealing to clubs in crisis, but his brand of football often alienated fans in the long run. His name is associated with the notion of old-fashioned football, dull and pragmatic. He rejects and resents the notion:

‘We all have the responsibility to play and entertain and win and the more we win the more we are able to increase the quality of player but for me how you play should never overtake the importance of the result.

‘The fans will be very forgiving if you win a football match and haven’t played very well. Fans won’t be forgiving if you out-play, out-pass the opposition but lose three on the trot. We’ve already seen a massive amount of goals from the opposition doing a high press and taking the ball off those centre-halves and putting the ball in the back of the net. That’s not entertaining; that is just stupidity.

‘I find it an incredible change that the style of play is outweighing results. It ended up costing me the Everton job. I took Everton from 16th, 15th to eighth but I was sacked on the style of play. I’ve never known that in the history of the game.’

Everton weren’t a long-ball team by the standards of the 2017/18 Premier League but nor were they entertaining. They scored 27 goals in Allardyce’s 24 games, as they rose from 13th (a minor memory error) to eighth. They were 19th in the whole season’s table in terms of shots, crosses, and dribbles that led to chances. They were third in tackles won, top in both pressures and fouls. Since he left, Everton have finished eighth again, then 12th, tenth, and 16th. Allardyce got one more job, suffering his first Premier League relegation with West Bromwich Albion in 2021. José Mourinho described Allardyce’s style as ‘19th-century football’.

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