EXCLUSIVE: Sam Allardyce is keen to raise awareness for a life-saving CPR campaign as he plots a potential route back into top-level management, two years after leaving Leeds
Big Sam is back on the march at 70 – and don’t rule him out of an encore in the dugout. Former England manager Sam Allardyce admitted he had never walked eight miles before setting off on the trek from Bolton Wanderers to Wigan Athletic, and the old sultan of bluster sounded genuinely daunted by the prospect.
Eight miles? That’s the equivalent of walking two rounds of golf. “Ah, that sounds more like it,” he boomed, and immediately you fancied Allardyce’s chances of staying the course more than another septuagenarian golf enthusiast who is trying to initiate a global recession across the Atlantic water hazard.
Say what you like about Big Sam – and too many people who have never even met him do – but he has never ducked a challenge and he completed the course like a frisky pup.
As a three-time cardiac patient himself, Allardyce happily signed up to join Sky Bet and the British Heart Foundation’s 2,500-mile Every Minute Matters Relay around all 72 Football League clubs to raise awareness of life-saving CPR for fans.
Warming to his task, he was immediately on-message. “I have had three stents fitted in my lifetime and fortunately I have not been a casualty of cardiac arrest because I managed to get myself sorted out before it escalated to that level.
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“I’m the sort of person who prefers an ounce of prevention to a pound of cure, and I get myself checked up. At the first sign of a problem, I’m straight on to the doctor. This campaign is about making people aware of heart disease and how we can save lives. All over the country, we want football fans to use the BHF’s RevivR learning tool online to do CPR training.
“It only takes 15 minutes but it might turn out to be the best quarter of an hour you spend. It’s a worrying statistic that, every year, 30,000 people outside hospital suffer cardiac arrest, and less than one in 10 survive. If more people knew how to perform CPR, potentially it would save more lives.
“I can still vividly remember what happened to Fabrice Muamba a couple of years after I left Bolton. Thanks to immediate CPR and defibrillation, Fabrice made a full recovery. He was probably the luckiest man who ever had a cardiac arrest because there were medical experts not only at the club but in the stands, and I still see him looking so well when I bump into him now.”
We last saw Allardyce trying to save Leeds United from relegation two years ago after he answered a desperate SOS from Elland Road with just four games of the season left. It was sad to see a manager of more than 1,000 games struggling to repel the waves like King Canute. But is that it?
“I would listen to anybody who picks up the phone and asks for my help,” he said. “But it would need to be a good project where we’re all pulling in the same direction. You may think that always happens at a football club but, believe me, it does not. Everyone has to align on the same pathway.
“I’m 70 now but I wouldn’t have a problem going back to work if the right opportunity comes along – why not? Never say never, but we all have our sell-by date, don’t we?”
Allardyce was often damned with faint praise as a disciple of route-one football, but he was also a genuine innovator. Many sports science methods adopted by football, like cryotherapy ice chambers, were first introduced by him at Bolton Wanderers, the club where he remains most revered.
He said: “I didn’t invent cryotherapy, but I did manage to persuade the Wanderers board we needed extra staff to provide services for the team’s longer-term benefit. The players loved those support mechanisms and now everybody’s doing it. I’ve not seen anything that ‘new’ in the game today that we weren’t doing 20-odd years ago.”
And what does the alleged high priest of the long ball make of today’s Pep Guardiola tribute acts in the Premier League and lower divisions? Allardyce sounds like the millions of fans who are bored senseless by too many games watching their team getting the ball forward at the speed of a tortoise.
“We are seeing too much tippy-tappy football now,” he frowned. “Young coaches are being brainwashed into it instead of thinking for themselves, thinking outside the box. The Premier League is about pitting your wits against another manager, not everyone going out and playing the same way all the time, particularly if your squad is not as big or strong as the opposition.
“Those who have the quality of players to play that system do it very well, but those who don’t need to find a different way. Too many clubs are saying, ‘We can’t employ you unless you play that way’ – that is totally and utterly wrong.”
Get in there, Big Sam.
To learn CPR in just 15 minutes, visit RevivR
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