Martin Allen was enjoying a nice quiet life until last Sunday. “I’ve been playing golf once a week, doing my garden, three classes of pilates, working on radio, being an ambassador at West Ham and helping the Premier League with the referee assessments.
“I’ve had such an easy, stress-free, nice quality of life; now all of a sudden it completely changes into a tsunami of telephone calls from agents, reporters, players – it’s non-stop. I have enjoyed it but it’s back into the madhouse.”
The madhouse is football management generally but Barnet specifically, where Allen has taken over for a fifth time. Last Sunday the club’s chairman, Tony Kleanthous, called Allen because things were not working out with their third manager of the season, Graham Westley, and they were spiralling towards relegation from the Football League.
Rossi Eames and Mark McGhee had also failed to prevent them from slumping into the League Two relegation places, and they are now bottom and seven points shy of safety with eight games remaining. Allen is back to try to rescue the club he has previously managed four times, broadly speaking with success, but usually with the sense he will not be around for long: two of those spells have lasted three games each. The plan is he will not be sticking around this time either: he has agreed an eight-week contract but, after that, who knows?
Kleanthous once likened Allen to “the girlfriend you can’t get rid of”, and there is something of the ill-advised marriage about their relationship. The classic case of not being able to live without each other, or indeed with each other: the Liz Taylor and Richard Burton of the Football League, if you like.
But while the secret of most successful relationships is clear, honest – honest and frequent communication – the opposite seems to be the case here. “It’s perfect, because I never talk to him,” says Allen, when asked about his bond with Kleanthous. “He just gives me the job and I get on with it. If I ever want anything, I send him a text and nine times out of 10 the answer is no. I know what he is, I know what he’s like, so he doesn’t bother me and I don’t bother him.”
This is by Allen’s own admission a “last throw of the dice” by Barnet to try to avoid dropping back into the National League, from where he brought them in 2015. But in December 2016 he unexpectedly left for Eastleigh, who sacked him two months later having won two games in 14.
It is safe to say that if any other League Two club approached Allen to be their fourth manager of the season, he would have stuck to radio work and pilates. His motivation for returning is clearly partly emotional. “The only reason I’ve come back is I was the manager when we got promoted – it was such a big thing for the players, supporters and of course the chairman. Now they’re staring at relegation.”
But there is also a more prosaic, practical element too: “Because it’s Barnet, I don’t have to move house. I’ve moved all over and disrupted my family life, and unless it was something quite unbelievable I wouldn’t really want to [do that again]. I know a few of the players and I think they’re better than they’re showing now.”
Ah yes, the players. One of the first things Allen did was drastically trim the squad, which had somehow ballooned to 43 , once trialists, non-contract players and others were taken into account. “I can’t have that amount in training sessions,” he says. “It was like a scene from Zulu – they were coming from everywhere. It was like: ‘Who are you? Which position do you play?’ I put them all up on the noticeboard and there were about five right-backs, nine centre-backs, five goalkeepers. I thought: ‘I can’t deal with this.’ I had to be pretty ruthless.”
Among the myriad concerns Barnet fans may have is Allen’s health: towards the end of his last spell at the club in late 2016, a minor problem with one of the valves in his heart was discovered, and though ultimately he was given the all-clear, it had an impact.
“It certainly changed me. Having all the tests and surgeon meetings to see what the hell was up with my heart – that’s scary. I wondered if I wanted to go back in and face up to the challenges as I’m doing now.
“Now I’m 110%, got the all-clear. The surgeon said I was in great shape for someone my age – I needed to hear that before coming back to this job. I was chuffed to bits. I went down the street skipping like a schoolboy.”
It says something about the addictive nature of management that a man who had recently faced his own mortality and was enjoying a pleasant, quiet life, would return to a side that is bottom of the Football League and, barring an extraordinary turnaround, heading for relegation. But the call came, and Allen could not help himself.
That said, it is the classic no-lose situation for Allen: keep them up and he is the hero, if they go down they were going down anyway. His first game is on Saturday, against second-in-the-table Luton. “This is the biggest challenge, there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “This is mission impossible.”
