Sam Allardyce: No Quick Fix at Newcastle
Another manager bites the dust, leaving another fine mess at Newcastle United. Perhaps it's about time the club showed a little patience…
Sooner or later – although my money would be firmly on later – the penny's going to finally drop at Newcastle United. They are not a massive club with a divine right for trophies, for honours, for glory. There is no quick fix solution. If they truly are a 'sleeping giant', as their fans are so fond of telling themselves, and everyone else, this is no gentle afternoon snooze on the sofa. This is the big sleep, and it'll take more than a few months to rouse them from it.
The news that Sam Allardyce has been sacked as Newcastle manager is predictable, and depressing. For this is what Newcastle do; recruit a manager, give him money, watch the clock. Anything less than a dream sequence of results, garnered by a team playing the most beautiful brand of football on the planet, and the axe is swung. They've have some decent gaffers over the years, Newcastle, even since the 'heady' days of Kevin Keegan; Dalglish, Gullit, Robson, Souness, Allardyce. Have they all been rubbish? No. Robson was given the most time to build a successful team and did the best job, but given his advancing years and a severe lack of long-term planning (where was the younger coach, installed alongside Sir Bobby to learn and develop and eventually succeed?), much of his good work was undone when he was sacked.
Allardyce is the latest big name manager to fall. At Bolton, he produced a team that achieved more than it could have ever expected to do so; at Newcastle, he was barely given enough time to break in a new pair of shoes, another victim of the bewildering impatience and misguided notions that plague St James' Park. And so the cycle will begin again, and Newcastle United will be as far away from the upper reaches of English football as ever.
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