WHEN he strolled into the press room at Sunderland’s Academy of Light training ground to perform his first media duties as the club’s new boss, Sam Allardyce was sporting a training top with the initials SA resplendent on his chest. It should have been a shiny gold star.

‘Big Sam, the Sheriff of Sunderland’. Riding into town to restore some much-needed order to a place where lawlessness and misadventure have been rife.

“I’m the troubleshooter,” said Allardyce, after he was asked how he regarded his role as Dick Advocaat’s successor. At which point, you felt like yelling, ‘Well you’ve come to the right place. There’s plenty of trouble around here, and in the last few seasons, the shooting’s not exactly been great’.


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There was a time when Dave Bassett was regarded as the natural port of call for ailing clubs in desperate need of salvation, but in the last few years, his ‘Red Adair’ mantle has passed to Allardyce. With that in mind, perhaps the biggest surprise about the 60-year-old’s arrival at Sunderland is that it has taken so long.

Ellis Short has tried just about everything in the last few years in an attempt to arrest his club’s decline, from the manic intensity of Paolo di Canio to the youthful vigour of Gustavo Poyet and on to the world-weary experience of Advocaat. Yet here we are, eight games into another season, and Sunderland still find themselves five points adrift of safety and embarking on yet another new dawn.

The difference this time, however, is that instead of trying to think outside the box, Short has gone with the option that was staring him in the face all along. Allardyce has already pulled off one act of escapology with Blackburn Rovers, when he was able to celebrate safety despite having inherited a side that had only claimed 13 points from their first 17 games, and also achieved promotion with Bolton and West Ham when he appeared to have walked into clubs on a downward trajectory.

Clearly, Allardyce is a man who likes a challenge, so when the telephone rang in his Spanish holiday villa at the start of the month – “It’s not called Casa St James’, that’s an urban myth, it’s called Big Sam’s Villa actually” – the side of his character that loves to prove people wrong quickly got the better of the part of him that was enjoying a rare spell of relaxation after 20 years at the coalface of football management.

The Northern Echo:

“Maybe there’s a part of me that needs to be fighting against something,” admitted Allardyce, whose instant command of the room yesterday hardly suggested any nervousness at what might lie ahead. “I remember (former Bolton chairman) Phil Gartside laughing at me and saying I’d never get into Europe. So I had to do that.

“When there is something along those lines, when someone tells me I can’t do something, there is something in me that wants to prove them wrong.”

Even so, you don’t get many managers walking into a situation that even their predecessor has decried as a hopeless cause.

Advocaat clearly had an axe to grind after he felt Short had reneged on promises to make a raft of big-money signings this summer, but the Dutchman’s searing assessment of the shortcomings of the current Sunderland squad would surely have put some people off taking over at the Stadium of Light.

Not Allardyce. The much-travelled boss has seen enough of the current side to conclude that survival is a realistic ambition. The defence will undoubtedly have to improve, the overall work rate will have to increase, and if a couple of out-of-contract players do not arrive in the next couple of weeks, you can bet your bottom dollar that Short’s cheque book will be open again come January.

It might, not for the first time with the Black Cats, prove to be a close-run thing. But Allardyce is confident he will disprove Advocaat’s verdict that Sunderland are destined for the drop.

“He (Advocaat) is a very experienced man and has worked with the players,” he said. “That’s his opinion and I have to prove that wrong don’t I?

“I have to be the man who comes in and at some point down the line is able to say, ‘Dick, you were wrong’. I hope I’m not saying ‘Dick, you were right’, that’s for sure. If that happens, I’ve made a bad decision, haven’t I?”

And for all that he might have his detractors due to perceived shortcomings in his preferred playing style, it’s hard to argue that Allardyce has made too many bad decisions in his career.

The obvious exception to that rule is his ill-fated seven-month spell in charge of Newcastle, a period that will come into even starker focus now that he has pitched up 20 miles or so down the road on Wearside.

The Northern Echo:

Advocaat claims his time on Tyneside is long forgotten, yet it was telling that he was at his most animated yesterday when he was discussing what went wrong at St James’ Park.

“We had a great start at my old club up the road,” he said. “18 points in the first ten games, which was the best start they’d had in God knows how many years. But that didn’t matter at Christmas when we had a bad result.

“If you get a bad result, you need your owners to be strong because you might be able to come through it. If you don’t have that, you get sacked.”

It felt like a dig at Mike Ashley, so how better to extract revenge than to steer Sunderland to survival at a time when a floundering Newcastle look certain to be one of their rivals at the foot of the table?

That sub plot will explode into life when the derby arrives a week on Sunday. For now, Allardyce’s focus is squarely on Saturday’s game at West Brom.

“I know what we have to do, and how to get out of the position we are in,” he said. With the clock already ticking, it is time for the troubleshooting to begin.