“I consider myself to be much more than that personally, but I can turn things around pretty quickly and I can get among teams and staff and try and create a successful journey”.
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“I will exploit all areas for the players benefit”.
“If you reflect back his intense desire to want to do it [was key]”. Working with the England elite players is going to be exiting for me. The success of saving the football club put me in the public eye for this position and I had a really good time at Sunderland, the fans were magnificent for me and I thank them all for that.
“The individuals and collectively as a teams are very important”.
Allardyce, who lost out on the England post to Steve McClaren in 2006, also reflected on the fulfilment of his life’s ambition as a coach.
“I think we suffered more sackings than ever before”. Rather than preparing for a welcome match at the national stadium, he will conduct additional training sessions with his squad at St George’s Park with all focus on the Group F qualifier in Trnava. There’s not a lot more I’m going to do after this one is there?
“I have been an advocate of that for the last ten years”.
“You can see he has a very strong mentality which I think will be good for us as a country. I couldn’t actually leave it alone”, he said. “Managing five Premier League teams has given me huge experience”.
Allardyce also refused to be drawn on Wayne Rooney’s future as England captain, saying it was too early to reveal his choice ahead of the World Cup qualifying campaign.
“It’s too early to say”.
“This is a different level, this is a different challenge and so I am challenging myself to be able to meet that challenge to help England get to a tournament and do better than they’ve done before”.
Scholes won 66 caps for England before a somewhat premature global retirement in 2004 and he feels the same problems that hindered the so-called “golden generation” during his own playing days are also harming the embattled squad Allardyce will inherit.
“There is no lack of passion, I don’t see that anywhere from the players”, Allardyce refuted. We only offered the job to one person and we offered the job to Sam [Allardyce], obviously.
“We worked on Jermain Defoe as a player who could not play up front on his own – that was it across the board”.
“It is a football thing that can happen at any time and it has happened a few times to Sunderland, we know what we have to do”.
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Although Allardyce has always been right to protest that his Bolton Wanderers’ team were not as crude as depicted by bitter caricaturists, the teams he managed more recently often were.
