Everton are expected to announce the appointment of Sam Allardyce as their new manager any moment now. Indeed, by the time you read this it may well have happened.
Toffees fans may well be underwhelmed by his arrival. They shouldn’t be. Allardyce is a superb manager who is probably one of the most misunderstood coaches there has ever been.
Allardyce is considered by those who are lazy and fond of clichés to be an old-style shout-and-bawl manager. This completely wrong. He is one of the most enlightened and forward-thinking Premier League coaches. When he was at Bolton Wanderers he adopted tactics and systems which were considered new fangled. Now everyone copies them.
He has also suffered because of the type of role he has had. Allardyce did a superb job in turning an unfashionable Bolton team into a top-half Premier League team. The natural step was to take on a bigger club with ambitions of European football, something which Allardyce felt Bolton weren’t that bothered by.
When he was appointed boss at Newcastle he got that chance (sort of) but the dim-witted locals never gave him a fair hearing and he was out on his ear. So he has forever been cast as a firefighter. A specialist in saving clubs from the dreaded drop.
At every club he has managed (Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn, West Ham, Sunderland) he has won more points in his first ten games than in the ten games before his arrival. He is brilliant at motivating and organizing players who have been neither. Which is why he would have been such a great fit for the England coaches job before he was sacked.
So what does this all mean for Everton? And, more importantly, what are we going to bet on?
Well, we expect Allardyce to do a superb job at Goodison Park. As do the markets. No longer are Everton considered to be in a relegation fight. They are now as big as 14/1 with Coral for the drop, coming after their 4-0 thrashing of West Ham United on Wednesday night with Allardyce watching from the stands.
The bet we want is the 3/2 with Betfair and Paddy Power that Everton finishes in the top ten. Under Allardyce, it should be relatively easy for them to bridge the current two-point gap between them and Brighton in tenth.
Allardyce, finally, has a squad of players who should be capable of matching his ambition. And in the January transfer window expect him to right the wrongs of Ronald Koeman, who failed to replace striker Romelu Lukaku.
A top-six finish is 10/1 with BetVictor. The price makes it sound impossible. But the club currently sixth? Burnley. The gap? Ten points. We think that might be too generous so have a small interest.
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