West Ham United captain Mark Noble has reflected on how former Hammers manager Sam Allardyce used to ‘lose it’ after heavy defeats.
The east London outfit are coming off a bitterly disappointing 2-0 defeat at Everton last time out, but Noble has revealed that Manuel Pellegrini’s post-match meltdowns pale in comparison to Allardyce’s.
“I’ve played under eight managers at West Ham and the one who would ‘lose it’ the most after a bad defeat was Sam Allardyce,” he wrote in his Evening Standard column.
“Sometimes you’d come back to the dressing room and he’d be screaming at you and then, when you got back on the coach, he’d say: “Right lads, see you tomorrow morning at 6am. You’ve made me sit through that rubbish today so you can all watch it again then!” But the great thing about Sam was that he didn’t bear a grudge. He’d tear into you one day and the next morning he’d come and sit with you at breakfast and chat about world politics.”
OPINION
This sounds exactly like how we’ve come to think of Allardyce. What this shows, though, is that there are different ways of doing things. Allardyce is a very intense man, someone who is the happiest guy in the room when things are going well, but the angriest after a woeful performance from his team. As Noble says, he’d go mental at the squad after a big defeat and get them straight in the next day to evaluate what went wrong. However, once that initial cooling down period was over, it was back to business as usual for him and his team. Pellegrini is an altogether more relaxed figure than the former England boss, of course. The Chilean rarely appears flustered, even after the Hammers’ very worst performances under his watch. Whether that generates as much of a reaction from his players as Allardyce’s methods is a matter of personal opinion, but it’s largely been working for Pellegrini at the London Stadium so far. However, we will see against Sheffield United on Saturday just how much of a reaction the boss has managed to get from his players.
