Tag Archives: west ham

May 24 2015
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Bye-bye, Big Sam

It’s a sad day for English soccer. Sam Allardyce – Sir Alex Ferguson’s second-most reliable sam allardycepunching bag, Charles Reep’s spiritual descendant – is leaving West Ham. He intends to take next season off.

“As a manager, you just ignore your family 24/7 when you do this job, and it’s time for me to give the family a little bit of time,” Allardyce said after West Ham’s 2-0 loss to Newcastle, adding that he plans to fly to Spain next week to vacation with his grandchildren.

I can already picture Allardyce in some Spanish park, furiously punting long-balls to his grandson as Barcelona’s academy team plays keep-away on an adjacent field. But perhaps today’s interview was all an elaborate ruse. Might Florentino Perez have secretly tapped Allardyce, who once memorably claimed he was “well-suited” for the Real Madrid job, to replace Carlo Ancelotti in the Bernabeu dugout? We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Jul 15 2014
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For Better Or Worse, It’s That Time Of Year

The ink has barely dried on the media’s last few attempts to make sense of the joint goal-iest World enner valenciaCup of all time, and football fans are already moving on. The tournament was terrific (9.25 out of 10, according to Sepp Blatter), but let’s be real here — July is all about the summer transfer window.

Yesterday, Ecuadorian striker Enner Valencia, whose gravity-defying leaps made him a star in Brazil, underwent a medical at West Ham; he’s expected to sign a contract later this week. In other words, while the rest of us reveled in Germany’s midfield dynamism and Holland’s speedy counterattacks, Sam Allardyce spent the last month scouting the South American Andy Carroll. Welcome back to the Premier League, everybody. Welcome back.

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Jul 15 2012
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What’s Next For Andy Carroll?

Brendan Rodgers is one of an ever-increasing number of football managers devoted to the mystical Barcelona Way, the aesthetically pleasing football method that, after a couple of years of obscurity, suddenly popped into our collective consciousness in 2008. The Barcelona Way got Rodgers where he is now. Without the inspiration of Cruyff, Guardiola and company, he would never have succeeded in teaching a Swansea team composed of honest, lower-league professionals to “play football the right way.” And had Swansea employed traditional kick-and-run tactics, they would probably have been relegated. And had they been relegated, Rodgers almost certainly wouldn’t have been hired by Liverpool.

It’s a bummer for Andy Carroll that Barcelona exist.

The really frustrating thing about Andy Carroll is that he fooled us all. That six-foot something bludgeon of a center forward, that Anfield flop, that money-grubbing drunk: he had us. All of us. When he scored ten goals during the first half of the 2010/11 Premier League season, when he routinely scared the bejesus out of real-life European defenders, we all thought he was good. Not just good; good. Future-of-English-football good. Gonna-bring-home-the-2018-World-Cup good.

These days, the best you can say about Carroll is that he probably didn’t do it on purpose. No footballer can control tabloid hype. Carroll didn’t decide to have his potential international future elevated from “maybe decent” to “certainly brilliant,” The Sun decided for him. Even in his glory moment – and moment is certainly the right word — Carroll probably knew that the press was only praising him to the heavens in preparation for a precipitous trip back down.

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