"The 47-year-old also denied that he had been approached by another club before choosing to quit. "As a young, ambitious manager I wish to move on to further my experiences," he said."
Whatever. He's sniffing around Aston Villa's ring, it's obvious.
The funny thing is, if he becomes Villa manager, the first thing he will say (and there will be no hint of irony in his voice) is that Downing and Young need to show some loyalty and remain with Villa.
He was pretty hard done by at Blackburn. The new owners had obviously already decided they didn't want someone they didn't pick themselves. Fat lot of good it did them this season.
He was unlucky at Newcastle too. I know he was on a dodgy run of results when he got sacked but they were still 11th in the table, having finished 13th the previous year, so it wasn't exactly a disaster. Long term I think they'd slowly but surely crept up the table if he'd stayed.
The Blackburn sacking was mad. Even if they wanted a new manager to bring a more attractive style to the club, let Allardyce comfortably keep the club away from relegation then replace him in the summer.
Allardyce manages to have success with teams at the expense of football. He's never going to have the fans on his side apart from probably at Bolton where he established them as a Premier League team. But...
In the way some clubs are stepping stones Allardyce is himself a stepping stone manager, a decent safe pair of hands who will get a club on a solid if unspectacular footing but as soon as he's done that the club itself will want more than he can deliver and look past him.
Was reading an interesting article in the blizzard by some chap who had inflation adjusted transfer spend by managers in the prem era and calculated who had the worst ever pounds per point return, it was Roy Hodgson at Blackburn the time he took them down (in conjunction with Kidd)
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