Big Sam gets to play it again

It was a case of once bitten, twice shy as the Blackburn Rovers board appointed a managerial successor to Paul Ince.

They had gambled and lost on a bright young manager so they were always going to look for a safe pair of hands.

And they don’t come much safer than Sam Allardyce, an experienced campaigner at Premiership level whose Bolton side was once the model for every club that strove for mid-table consistency.

While I am sure ‘Big Sam’ has every chance of halting Blackburn’s woeful run of form and steering the team away from the relegation precipice, I can’t help but feel a sense of sadness over Ince’s brutal deposition.

It is not so much Ince himself who I am concerned for, more the type of manager he represents.
Sure, there are accusations he has been fast-tracked from the lower leagues on the basis of his reputation as a player and his managerial CV, however impressive, was short.

But he had, albeit briefly, had success at a less glamorous level and, in my book, earned a shot at the big time.

He was an up and coming man who may take time to get to grip with management at the elite level but had fresh ideas and wanted to take the club forward.

The fact is Blackburn took him on knowing there was a risk of failure, but instead of backing their judgement in Ince’s long term vision they took an easy get out clause and opted for someone to offer stability as soon as things got tough.

There were several factors that also didn’t help Ince, the team he was managing was still very much Mark Hughes’ team with most of the players either signed by or building their reputations under the current Manchester City boss.

How much the decline in performance of a number of those Hughes players – Morten Gamst Pedersen, Ryan Nelson and Chris Samba to name a few – is down to natural career cycles or form and how much is down to Hughes’ superior motivation only the players themselves will know.

One man who is unlikely to be on Ince’s Christmas card list though – and the lists of other under pressure managers such as Tony Mowbray – is Harry Redknapp.

‘Arry’s success at Spurs is in danger of being held up as a vindication by other boards of the method of sacking the current campaigner and hiring a wily old campaigner.

While I know the financial stakes are so big now boards will always err on the side of caution, I feel we will never produce another generation of really top managers unless the younger ones are given full backing and time to build their own teams and do things their own way.