It won’t have escaped the notice of football fans that Sam Allardyce, who took Bolton from the
championship via the play-offs and kept them for four consecutive seasons in the top eight, is now back in the Premier League.
After surprisingly leaving Bolton and an unsuccessful short spell at Newcastle he now has the herculean task at Blackburn Rovers of maintaining their Premiership status. Despite his previous success he is still regarded by many as a dinosaur amongst modern managers, some complaining about the way his team played the game. Too physical they said, no finesse and over-reliance on the long ball. A discussion I had earlier in the season however gave me a new insight into the man.
What prompted the discussion was that, while watching Euro 2008 on television, I thought I detected a new, more subtle way in which players were trying to influence decisions by referees. When referees gave a foul against them, instead of protesting in a loud and blatant manner, players would give a little head shake, and make a hand gesture which seemed to say, ‘OK but you know you got that one wrong’. What it seemed to me was that they were trying to put doubt in the referee’s mind so that the next time he went to give a foul against the player, he might be forced into having second thoughts and, if it was marginal, would give the player the benefit of the doubt.This didn’t happen
just once, it appeared to be a re-occurring theme. Did I just imagine that or was there really something in it?
At the beginning of this season when talking to Keith Hackett, who is head of Premiership, Football League and Conference referees, I took the opportunity to ask him just that question.
He thought I had been quite perceptive in spotting this trend and said what we have to remember is that more and more clubs are including sports psychiatrists amongst their back up teams. These are specialists whose job it is to coach players how to behave on the field and as part of this, how to try and get referees to look at them more favourably.
To my great surprise, Keith Hackett told me that one of the leading managers in English football in the development of this, was Sam Allardyce when he was at Bolton. Having witnessed one of the worst examples of trying to influence a referee by Allardyce’s captain at Bolton, Kevin Nolan, which earned him first a yellow card and then a red one, it surprised me to learn that Bolton players had any guidance on how to behave to a referee.
However he assured me that far from being the old fashioned manager that
Allardyce was portrayed to be, with rough tough footballers whose only tactic was to get the ball in the opponent’s penalty area as often as possible,
he was one of the most forward thinking around. He led the way in video analysis of games and opposing teams and was an early devotee of prozone. But he also went further than many in the hiring of nutritionists, physiotherapists, and psychiatrists to ensure that his players were not only physically fit but mentally strong enough to deal with the pressure of modern football.
Keith Hackett in fact applauded all this as indeed he might. He is of course an extensive user himself of prozone in checking on his referees’ performances and he includes in his team the same sort of sports scientists, including a sports psychologist, to ensure referees are physically and mentally equipped for the games at the top level. When we watch Big Sam on television, with his tie askew and infuriating some viewers by chewing gum with an open mouth, we will know that behind that bluff exterior there lies an
innovative mind.
Dick Sawdon Smith
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© R Sawdon Smith 2008