The main man was running slightly late. “Feels familiar,” joked a reporter recalling long afternoons spent waiting for Sam Allardyce when he was in charge at Newcastle United, and as he finally burst through the door Sunderland’s new manager had the grace to make a joke about time-keeping.
There were flashes of recognition as he surveyed the sea of faces in front of him, several of whom had followed his ultimately unhappy stint at St James’ Park back in 2007-08. “We all look older, don’t we?” he said, smiling before threatening to order the owner of a ringing phone to make a £10 charity donation.
Appreciably tightened discipline, on and off the field, is clearly required among Sunderland’s squad but Allardyce has promised to handle a set of players once again embroiled in their annual relegation skirmish with perhaps unanticipated care and subtlety.
Having made it clear first-teamers need to assume greater responsibility, a man who will shortly celebrate his 61st birthday suggested Sunderland’s problems run a little deeper. The task ahead is more complicated than merely asking individuals to stand up and be counted. It seems he might well, once again, utilise the psychological profiling system he relied upon at Bolton.
“Mental fragility is there, no doubt about it,” said Allardyce. “The mental side is the one end of football that’s really important. The psychological profile of the player and where he lies at the minute is important. And the mental fragility has to be relieved, has to be taken away by me using my experience, or the staff using their experience, to put those fears aside. To remind the player how good he is, why he’s here, about his talent and why he’s lost his way. I like to be proactive on that; not reactive. I’m managing people and my people skills are my life skills.”
Listening to his thoughtful, measured, somewhat holistic comments it was hard to equate Allardyce with the rather more abrasive character who has used a new autobiography to brand Arsène Wenger as “arrogant” and “a bad loser”. As Rafael Benítez already knows and the Sunderland owner, Ellis Short, will doubtless soon learn, though, Allardyce specialises in straight talk and rarely pulls punches.
Such clarity is probably precisely what the American financier requires right now and the manager, who is likely to be offered a decent January transfer-window budget, has already identified sometimes wildly sub-standard recruitment as the reason why Sunderland have spent much of the last decade floundering.
“Without being too critical of anyone, the problem has to be recruitment,” Allardyce said.
“You live or die by who you recruit to play for you. At West Ham it all boiled down to me recruiting better and better each year. The owners backed me to sign the players and we made fewer and fewer mistakes over time. The last year at West Ham was the best of my life in terms of my recruitment. It’s the hardest job in football.”
Bringing the best out of those on Sunderland’s books will entail considerable dedication from his all-important support team. “You have to have a good backroom staff,” he said. “And they have to be highly educated professionals.”
Some of his predecessors have claimed it was difficult to persuade transfer targets to relocate to the north-east but Allardyce sees little unattractive about Sunderland’s habitat.
“Well, it won’t be a problem if you get them here, to this training facility and then get them round the stadium,” he said. “This place is magnificent. I’ve not worked at a training facility as good as this in my entire life – West Ham’s wasn’t very good at all. This place gives me the best opportunity to get the best out of players. If you get out of bed and don’t like coming here ... man, you shouldn’t be working in the game.”
Then came a well-weighted pause followed by a less than coded message to Short. “You’ve got to pay ’em well, though,” he reflected. “If you don’t hit the mark financially, you don’t get the player.”
Allardyce is confident he can convince an owner singed by spending heavily on a series of shocking buys that his money will be well invested this time. “Working with players, no matter how challenging, is what I’m best at,” he said. “It’s a drug, an adrenaline drug, it’s an addiction – that’s what my wife keeps telling me – I can’t leave it alone.
“But I think it’s what I was put on the planet to do.”
