Bringing The Best Out Of The Blues

The new manager of Everton Football Club, Sam Allardyce, is a boss who combines man-management skills and science with tactical nous and ambition. One of the most respected figures in football, those he has worked with over the years explain the qualities he will bring to the Club.

- Paul McNamara

Ivan Campo played under some of the very best football managers. Vicente Del Bosque, Guus Hiddink, Jorge Valdano. That’s three European Cups, a European Championship and nine domestic titles, right there.

By Campo’s reckoning, though, nobody compares with Sam Allardyce - not even that venerated and much garlanded trio.

“Sam taught me everything I know,” said Campo of the man who brought him to Bolton Wanderers in 2002 .

Campo was nobody’s idea of a conventional footballer, this free-spirited Spain international who landed at Bolton with his Champions League winner’s medal and distinctive mop of hair.

With his view on Everton’s new boss, however, former Real Madrid player Campo conforms to the crowd.

A craggy, uncompromising centre-half during his own playing career, Allardyce’s evolution into one of the game’s most pioneering managers traverses the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea.

It owes something to a bothersome hamstring, too. And it certainly has its roots in a broad mind and steely core.

Not to mention an underrated ability to connect with every one of the eclectic bunch of individuals who constitute your typical Premier League dressing room today.

Allardyce can empathise with the gnarled defenders cut from his own cloth. But he can coax consistent brilliance from maverick ball players, too. And make a kid from the academy feel 10-feet tall as he prepares to duel with world-renowned opponents.

Allardyce has been at this for more than a quarter of a century. But it is only right we start at Bolton Wanderers – even if Allardyce’s body of work before he was tempted back to the club where he played for nine years would be the envy of swathes of his contemporaries.