Pizzas galore!

“ ‘Yeah, but we’re getting tanked in midfield. I’ve got to get a midfield three in there to give us any chance. We can’t afford to concede another goal and we have to get one back.’

“ ‘You’re not going to get a goal by taking off your leading scorer.’

“ ‘But he ain’t getting in the game because we’re being outplayed in midfield.’

“So I took Holdsworth off, got three into midfield and played our three fastest players, Bo Hansen, Michael Ricketts and Ricardo Gardner, on their three centre-halves who were big but not the quickest. Our fans booed when we took Holdsworth off. They weren’t booing the team, they were booing me. ‘He’s lost it this guy, he can’t cope. Boo!’ But the game changes and we score two goals in the last nine minutes and it ends 2-2. And now everyone is cheering.”

He tells this story for no particular reason other than to say that Sam Allardyce, the old centre-back who paid his dues with hard tackles and firm headers, is a little smarter than you may think. Once he got to the Premiership, he proved that. The club didn’t have a transfer budget and he had to find a way to get players good enough to keep his team in one of football’s most competitive leagues.

What he did was at once novel and ingenious. He went to football’s equivalent of Oxfam and searched for designer labels cast off by the well-off. Unwanted, they didn’t have a price tag but they came with baggage. Fredi Bobic, Youri Djorkaeff, Bruno N’Gotty, Okocha, Emerson Thome, Ivan Campo, Ibrahim Ba and Fernando Hierro were among those persuaded by Allardyce to enjoy the autumn of their careers at wintery Bolton. “The financial devastation suffered by this club meant that the players who were willing to join us were mostly players discarded by their previous club. They were written off because their attitude wasn’t right, their motivation had gone, they were disruptive, the coach couldn’t work with them, or some other reason. Our job was to assess whether that player wanted to rediscover his old self.”

When results go against the team, supporters speak of the club being a galactico retirement home. But it has worked. Allardyce’s team is now in its fourth consecutive season in the Premiership and despite the terrible recent run, they are good enough to comfortably sustain their position in the top flight. They have done so spending just £750,000 in transfer fees through 2004 and £2m the year before. To get players to join Bolton, Allardyce uses honesty and the force of his personality. “I live with a club that has a great history but it is not a great club. What attracts the foreign lads is the lure of the Premiership and the fact that over here their contracts will be honoured in full. Many foreign players have told us they have been at big football clubs and have not been paid. We are talking the Spanish and Italian leagues, we are talking serious places where they have decided they don’t want the player any more and just cut the guy off. Not just from the playing point of view but from the financial point of view as well. This gives us something we can use in our favour, a huge advantage. What I say to the lads is, ‘Look, this country, never mind what the football authorities might say, this country would not allow any footballer who is under contract to be cut off like that.’ It is one of the major reasons more and more foreign players want to come to this country.”

The difficulty that confronts Allardyce is the motivation of his players. How can a man perform for Bolton after spending most of his career at Real Madrid? “It’s not just Campo and Hierro,” says the manager. “Take Stylianos Giannakopoulos, who came from Olympiakos having won seven Greek championships on the trot. This sounds really bad on the club, but the reality is that it is not quite big enough to demand the best out of these players.

“So I have to drag it out of them. Because of what they have achieved elsewhere, we know they are capable of taking Bolton to where it’s not been. My job is to make sure they do that and it is a difficult job. But my strength is my DNA; with Sam Allardyce, what you see is what you get. My desire to be successful is very strong and I am good at infecting others and inspiring them to strive for the same thing.”

THE DNA of Sam Allardyce.

We have spoken for a long time, trawled through his life and then back for little bits that slipped through the net. Then, just when it seems there is no more he wishes to give, he revisits his childhood. His mum and dad had come in search of work from Scotland to Dudley, near Wolverhampton.

His father was a policeman, his mum had a part-time job, they lived on a council estate but they didn’t lack for anything. They used to say that baby Sam was a mistake, coming 15 years after his sister, five years after his brother. “It must have been a good Saturday night, Dad,” he would say to his father when he was old enough to make such jokes.

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