It may have been the worst trip down under for a British side since the England cricket team’s disastrous visit last winter. West Ham were beaten by Wellington Phoenix and Sydney FC and lost striker Andy Carroll. Divisions at the club were exposed, debate about manager Sam Allardyce’s position reopened.
Long before the season starts, a favourite has been installed in the sack race: Allardyce. To many, it was a surprise he survived the last campaign. When he did, it was a statement from the board talking about the club’s ethos and passing principles. Or, as it was predictably called, the “West Ham Way”.
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Then there is the Allardyce Way. The diet of direct and defensive football, the emphasis on set-pieces, the willingness to subjugate more talented players according to the needs of his on-field lieutenant, the cumbersome Kevin Nolan. When philosophies collide, there are few winners. Certainly not West Ham, who scored twice – one an own goal – and conceded five in their New Zealand misadventure.
Allardyce blamed the 3-1 defeat to Sydney on an enforced change of approach.
“We’re just working on our new style as we’ve got to get a bit more open and expansive as it seems to be what’s demanded in the game now,” he said. “We’re working on that side but have lost the defensive resilience that saw us get 14 clean sheets last season.”
That has long been his argument, that there is a trade-off in the quest for attacking football.
Allardyce has often insisted his teams have entertained. He has tended to lose the argument. The Big Sam predicament has been a constant. He is a one-man guarantee of survival. His methods upset fans.
Both Newcastle and Blackburn were relegated 18 months after sacking him. West Ham, who are preparing to move into the Olympic Stadium in 2016, cannot afford to go down. Allardyce has twice steered them to safety, once without alarms and after a visit to the bottom three last season.
The board held their nerve when they were under pressure to sack him, then. They backed him again in May but there are increasing signs they are not enjoying his regime.
Allardyce was hounded out of Newcastle. West Ham have similar expectations of a style of play. And, it seems, stylish players. The gifted, unpredictable Ravel Morrison is becoming a cause celebre. A crowd-pleaser could be exiled. “Sam has said Ravel is not part of his plans but we, as a board, see him as part of our plans,” co-owner David Sullivan told Talksport.
It raises the question of who picks the players or, indeed, who signs and sells them. The summer recruitment drive has encompassed some uncharacteristic arrivals for an Allardyce side. Diego Poyet is a passing midfielder, Mauro Zarate a No 10 for a team who prefer to field the uncreative Nolan behind the sole striker to feed off the flick-ons. One offers more elegance, the other an efficiency proved over the best part of a decade in the manager’s teams.
While the Ecuadorian target man Enner Valencia is more of a typical Allardyce arrival and while it should give West Ham a better deputy for Carroll as, for the second successive campaign, he misses the opening months, another expensive batch of signings – amounting to some £30 million (Dh187.1m) – serves to confuse matters.
With West Ham seeming split in different directions, between the physical and the technical, the manager and the power brokers, it suggests a parting of the ways would have been more logical so they could have proceeded with one vision.
Instead, the seeds of a civil war seem sown. Allardyce is the ultimate Roundhead: stern, joyless, efficient. West Ham want to be Cavalier: fun-loving, pleasure-seeking, heedless of the future.
Big Sam’s mathematical formula invariably ensures a minimum of 40 points and the probability of 50. Owners and supporters hope to reach their destination in a more entertaining manner. But disharmony can lead to disappointment. As the England cricket team can testify, flaws exposed in Australasia do not always disappear on a return to British soil.
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