True to the testimonies of our opposite
numbers at Newcastle and West Ham, Sam Allardyce is indeed a fate worse than
relegation. Whether winning, losing or drawing, his team is serving up the most
unpalatable ‘style’ of anti-football that £200m can buy, and he’s talking pure,
unadulterated bollocks while they do it.
We can’t say that we weren’t warned.
The funny thing is, Quod Magnum Unus had his
tail up earlier in the week, after a home victory over Leicester City moved
Everton to within nine points of the magic 40 mark. It was a night that will
mostly be remembered for the return of Seamus Coleman, who put in a remarkable
shift considering the length of time he had spent out injured, as well as the
first and second goals of Theo Walcott’s Everton career. The England winger
already looks to have been good business at £20m – especially when compared to
many of his exorbitantly priced teammates – evidenced by the frankly
embarrassing fact that, by virtue of scoring two goals and providing a single
assist in his first two outings, he had already been involved in 11% of
Everton’s total league goals for the season.
Despite it being somewhat churlish to focus
on the elements of good fortune that played a part in securing a much-needed
win against Claude Puel’s in-form Foxes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. The
visitors arrived without two of their best players in rested midfielder Vicente
Iborra and wantaway attacker Riyad Mahrez – whose latest attempt at escaping King
Power’s Landing saw him go the Carlos Tevez route and outright refuse to play –
and in truth, they didn’t really look up for it until a Jamie Vardy penalty
swung the momentum in their favour with 20 minutes to go. They did see a number
of efforts hit the woodwork, with Harry Maguire heading against the crossbar
from a corner in the first half, and substitute Kalechi Ihenacho inexplicably
hitting both the post and bar under pressure from Jordan Pickford late on, but
it was an overall listless performance from a team with designs on playing
Europa League football next season.
For his part, Allardyce picked what is
presumably his preferred XI for games that he expects to win; and aside from the
baffling decision to break up the centre-back pairing of Mason Holgate and
Ashley Williams, it made sense. The lineup looked, on paper at least, a little
bit narrow and unbalanced, but as the first half developed it became clear that
the idea was to have a midfield and frontline where everyone pressed high,
leaving Wayne Rooney to collect possession from deep and probe for openings. It
wasn’t the prettiest to watch, but given that Oumar Niasse could, and really
should, have had the Blues four-nil up by half-time, even the most ardent Brown
Envelope Gang basher would have to begrudgingly admit that the steak bake-headed
one got his tactics right.
Then came the trip to Arsenal.
Not since David Moyes threw an Anfield
derby, only to then go and draw the FA Cup tie that he was resting players for,
has there been such an egregious display of small-time thinking from an Everton
manager. Saturday’s fixture was one of 13 left to play, and with so many points
available – not to mention the advantage of expedient departures from all cup
competitions at the earliest opportunity – there was simply no excuse for him
to begin the match in damage limitation mode. He went with what basically
amounted to a back-seven, despite Michael Keane demonstrating time and again
that he doesn’t know how to play in anything other than the flattest of fours, and
then had the audacity to level blame at the players when it turned out that
sitting deep and inviting pressure from a lineup boasting Mesut Ozil, Henrikh
Mkhitarayan and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang could be a bit of a risk for a team
that was recently played off the park by West Brom.
The biggest cause for concern is that, once
again, a sizeable majority of the players didn’t look remotely arsed about
being humiliated on live television. This mob of farts and mercenaries aren’t
exactly bursting with professional pride at the best of times, and so it came
as no surprise to see the likes of Morgan Schneiderlin and Yannick Bolasie
going through the motions after realising that Allardyce obviously sees them as
little more than big club cannon fodder. You would think then, knowing he had hung the
players he doesn’t really rate out to dry, that he would have thought better of
the hubris he showed in mocking Arsene Wenger’s inability to organise a
defence; but no, he couldn’t help himself. He publicly declared that Arsenal
don’t know how to defend, and then selected Cuco Martina, who doesn’t know how
to defend, and put him right next to Eliaquim Mangala, who is Manchester City’s
equivalent of Martina. To top it off, he then responded to the defeat by absolving
himself of all blame, on the grounds that he told the lads to just play like
Swansea.
£6m a year this fella is on.
Now, thanks to yet another embarrassing
result against a side which cost £20m less than the stiffs that Allardyce
fielded, there is tremendous pressure going into the weekend encounter with a
Crystal Palace team that are no mugs. It was one thing for the crowd to accept
that between Ronald Koeman and Steve Walsh’s summer transfer bonanza, and David
Unsworth’s stint as caretaker being desperate enough to earn him the nickname
John Carvery, the season was pretty much a write-off by autumn; however,
expecting them to sit idly by and watch this crew of charlatans inflict
further, possibly irreparable, damage is something altogether different. For
all the talk of lad bantz and team spirit, Allardyce has already proven to be
as divisive and polarising as Koeman and Roberto Martinez were, and that’s
after just two months in the job.
Honestly, I’d just sack him now and get
Marco Silva in. The club wanted him anyway, and he’ll only end up getting the
Southampton job once Mauricio Pellegrino does enough to warrant the bullet.
There are obvious concerns surrounding the manner of his departure from
Watford, but at the end of the day, it’s incredibly unlikely that either Farhad
Moshiri or Bill Kenwright could even name a decent manager working outside of
Britain, never mind appoint one.
