For Sam Allardyce, it begins on Sunday evening when England play Slovakia, but maybe something came to an end last week when he left Ross Barkley out of his squad and then it was revealed that Paddy McGuinness and Bradley Walsh would be hosting a quiz to entertain the England players.
For some, these developments came as a crushing disappointment. Barkley seems to have recovered his form and is surely the kind of player a new England manager would want around, while Paddy McGuinness – or Paddy McGuinness and his joke as Stewart Lee put it – is Paddy McGuinness, and there’s no escaping that.
With these decision, there was a sense of a manager conforming to type. Big Sam got the job to be Big Sam, but could he not be Big Sam with a twist? A Big Sam who invites, say, Louis CK round to the team hotel or a Big Sam who reveals he has developed an obsessive interest in the novels of Elena Ferrante.
Instead Sam revealed himself to be everything people thought he was, a process which underlined once more that the greatest asset a manager can have sometimes is an air of mystery.
International football lends itself to this with the long months of drift and apathy when nobody is really paying attention. And that’s just the qualifiers.
These games are anticipated with the giddy expectation usually reserved for having the boiler serviced, but if they do anything, they allow a manager to keep something of himself from the people.
A manager in this position can cultivate a certain aura, something which takes longer to lose in the world of international management. Sven Goran Eriksson was, for a long time, hailed for his minimalism and his love of Tibetan poetry.
During the 2002 World Cup, one arts writer gushed that “before the Argentina game, he asked the England players for ‘an effort stretching to the stars’. For supporters used to stuff along the lines of ‘we was excellent first half, but poor second’, this was like reading Ezra Pound after Enid Blyton.”
Sven worked this image perfectly until the mystery fell away and then he seemed to be a bland man uttering banalities.
There are others who struggle once the perception has altered. When David Moyes says that Sunderland are in a relegation battle, he is saying the things that most Sunderland managers have said recently, but he is fighting a changed perception. After his Old Trafford experience, he is seen as fatalistic and often it is no good being right as a football manager if people think you’re saying the wrong thing.
Certain England managers retain their aura a little longer. When Fabio Capello arrived, he was commended for his art collection, while it was noted approvingly that he was “an adventurous eater”. Roy Hodgson’s book collection appeared to protect him for a long time, maybe too long.
When Hodgson was appointed, a Guardian editorial stated that he was “probably the only football manager in England to have once drawn parallels between his career and a Kandinsky painting”. It might have been more relevant, and saved people time, to note that he was also the man who signed Paul Konchesky for Liverpool.
Big Sam has launched other initiatives beyond the recruitment of McGuinness and Walsh. Last week the media received a letter in which he wrote he was “looking forward to working with you over the course of this two-year campaign as we all strive to reach the finals in Russia.”
There are some who favour this “working with” formulation, but it has always been more accurate to say that the media is working near those in football and it remains to be seen what journalists will be doing exactly as part of the collective striving to reach the finals.
Sam Allardyce's welcome message to the press at SGP today. pic.twitter.com/d2QmzTd9EY
— Nick Mashiter (@nickmashiter) August 29, 2016
Of course, they shouldn’t be doing anything at all, but Allardyce has always liked to display his modernity in as many ways as possible, even if some of them end up looking like lame gimmicks.
“I haven’t come here to be miserable,” he said last week. “They are in a hotel, they’ve got their rooms, we’ve got a leisure area just off the hotel rooms which is for their leisure, their pastimes. Then we’ve got the Club England area, which is the business end of what we do before we get to training. There’s facilities where they are can chill out, relax among themselves, play some table tennis, pool.”
Despite all that, the England players are also said to dislike St George’s Park, the base for Club England and the spiritual home of any corporate bullshitter who ever had a dream.
There are no winners here, because the players would become unhappy, eventually, wherever they found themselves. If they trained at the base of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, it wouldn’t be long before they complained that the little streams of alcohol came down the rocks in the wrong direction.
Yet if England are successful, all this stuff will be written about with the same sense of wonder that attaches itself to marginal gains today, with the Club England area – “the business end of what we do” – achieving some kind of mystical significance.
But there might be no mystery. International football may simply depend on relaxing players for a few weeks every other summer and ensuring they play as if they don’t care.
Roy Hodgson had read good books but it was irrelevant once Iceland came along. Paddy McGuinness and Bradley Walsh are a long way from the novels of Stefan Zweig, but they will be seen as the missing link if Allardyce’s England are successful. Then the mystery will be why nobody thought of booking them before.
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