It was the sort of damp, unseasonal, May morning when low-lying grey cloud blanketed the Yorkshire countryside and only the car headlights spearing a path east fractured the gloom. Sam Allardyce has travelled to work in far worse conditions but, as he swung off the A1(M) at Wetherby and on to the winding B-road through apparently endless fields, his mood matched the weather.
Anyone expecting the new Leeds manager to stride through the training ground door in full showman mode, perhaps even accompanied by a blast of Tina Turner’s Simply The Best, would have been sorely disappointed on Friday. “Saturday morning, I’ll be pretty nervous,” says Allardyce. “And the nerves will carry on until kick-off.”
Indeed, as the 68-year-old calmly fielded questions from journalists before Saturday’s visit to Manchester City he seemed almost a different man from the “Big Sam” who, less than 48 hours earlier, had informed the media that “no one’s better than me; not Pep, not Klopp, not Arteta”. If that boast by Allardyce had been an attempt to deflect attention from his relegation-threatened players it worked. But the Premier League’s man of the moment has always been a bit of a chameleon and now he was reminding his audience he has always been rather more three-dimensional than initial appearances may suggest.
On Wednesday, Allardyce emerged from two years in retirement carrying his 6ft 3in frame with a hint of a swagger and dominating the room, but Friday revealed a more nuanced, more emotionally intelligent and, perhaps, counterintuitive Big Sam. Admittedly, he replied “absolutely” to the suggestion that, in Pep Guardiola’s shoes he, too, would be challenging for the treble, but that was about as far as the grandstanding went.
“I’ve just tried to make everybody feel better,” said Leeds’s third official manager of the season almost self-deprecatingly. “I’ve had a lot of chats with the lads in my office and lighthearted conversations on the training ground. We talk about all sorts. Nothing to do with football or coaching, just life in general. They sometimes give me odd looks when I crack a joke!
“But finding out about people’s personalities gives you a better understanding of them. And a player’s mind is everything. I have to talk to them about controlling their minds, about mindfulness. If you’re not in the right frame of mind it’s very difficult to produce your best.”
Average current placing in table of final four opponents
West Ham 11.5
Leicester 8.25
Leeds 7.0
Nottm Forest 11.25
Everton 8.5
Southampton 9.75
Points won so far this season against final four opponents
West Ham 1
Leicester 1
Leeds 2
Nottm Forest 7
Everton 1
Southampton 0
Average points picked up by final four opponents in last 10 games
West Ham 10.75
Leicester 15.5
Leeds 18.75
Nottm Forest 12
Everton 19.75
Southampton 13
Points picked up in last 10 games
West Ham 11
Leicester 6
Leeds 8
Nottm Forest 5
Everton 8
Southampton 6
Given that Javi Gracia’s former players have lost five of their past seven games and conceded 23 Premier League goals during April alone there is a sense that no tactical conjuring tricks – and Allardyce was not ruling out playing a back three – will work without some parallel psychological repairs.
After collecting 10 points from his first six games, Gracia’s own interim Leeds role went horribly wrong from the moment Crystal Palace’s Marc Guéhi volleyed a set-piece equaliser beyond Illan Meslier at Elland Road last month. It was shortly before half-time; by the final whistle Leeds had lost 5-1, and eight days later Liverpool put six past them.
To regular Leeds watchers it looked as if Guéhi’s goal had prompted an overstretched piece of elastic to finally snap. A team which had spent recent seasons living on adrenaline as they played a high-energy, high-risk, ultra-intense pressing game under Marcelo Bielsa and then Jesse Marsch had finally lost their collective nerve.
Gracia said he felt the team were like a boxer who had been knocked over once too often and, despite trying to get back on their feet, was simply too weak and dazed to carry on punching. Allardyce’s response is not to drill his 13th club side to death, let alone bombard them with tactical instruction, but rather to afford individuals “brain space.”
“I absolutely envisage giving these players enough days off,” he says. “All the rubbish that spouts from everyone saying you have to keep them at the training ground for six hours a day is the biggest load of poppycock I’ve ever heard in my entire life. If you shut their brain space down, the players will shut down; they won’t be able to perform. When a footballer sometimes can’t run properly people say ‘he’s not physically fit’ but it’s because he’s mentally shot. These players need time off to rest their brains.
“They can create very good mindsets and prepare to play better by relaxing at home. They’re in the Premier League because they’ve got the best football brains, the best decision-making ability. You can have much more skilled players in the lower divisions but unfortunately their brains don’t work as quickly. But all brains need rest.”
Which rather begs the question as to whether Meslier, Leeds’s gifted but out-of-form goalkeeper, requires a sabbatical. Should Allardyce stick with the 23-year-old Frenchman or offer the former Everton keeper Joel Robles his Leeds debut? “I don’t see any problems with Illan in training but there’s no real pressure there,” the manager says. “Picking the goalkeeper will be one of my biggest decisions.”
All this talk of rest and relaxation emphasised precisely what a volte face Leeds have performed since sacking the workaholic Bielsa 14 months ago. “To get Big Sam in to play very, very basic football just to keep you up feels like the plan must have gone so badly wrong,” says Simon Rix, bassist with the Kaiser Chiefs, during a recent Radio Leeds podcast. “Everything’s broken, the players look broken, the staff look broken, the ownership looks broken.”
The majority of Rix’s fellow Leeds supporters blame the club’s former director of football, Victor Orta, sacked alongside Gracia last week, for a slavish obsession with pressing which led him to appoint Marsch largely because the American followed a broadly similar tactical template to the still revered Bielsa.
At least Andrea Radrizzani, the club’s increasingly frazzled owner, can rest assured Allardyce’s ability to detach his emotions should help him remain objective during the four games that remain to be played this season. “Some managers like emotional attachment but they can easily get paranoid,” says Gracia’s successor. “The calmer you are the better judgments you’ll make.”
Even so, the distracted haste with which Allardyce parked his car on Friday, leaving it straddling two bays and denying the kit man sufficient space to squeeze in alongside, indicated he is far from dispassionate about his latest assignment.
