After Everton went down to another hugely dissapointing and damaging defeat against Aston Villa on Saturday, do the club need to consider re-hiring Sam Allardyce?
I know this won’t go down well with many Everton supporters and he’s certainly not my first-choice either, but frankly this feels like such a serious crisis that I wonder whether desperate times require desperate solutions.
Some reports today claim that the Toffees are close to agreeing a deal for ex-Porto coach Vitor Pereira to take over as permanent manager. This has all the fingerprints of so-called ‘super agent’ Kia Joorabchian whispering in Farhad Moshiri’s ear.
Other stories claim that in fact the Portuguese manager is simply one of several candidates we all know about who are still being seriously considered.
Whether Pereira is the new frontrunner or not, it does seem increasingly clear that the club are not ready to give the job to Duncan Ferguson until the end of the campaign and are determined to get a permanent appointment sorted out as soon as possible.
None of the individuals who appear to have made it onto Farhad Moshiri’s shortlist are totally convincing by any means and there is very little agreement amongst Evertonians as to how on earth this club moves forward.
Of all the named candidates, my own instinct is Wayne Rooney with Ferguson as his number two. Given Rooney’s status as a top player, links to the club, recent experience and relative achievements managing a club and a team in crisis, I think that might be the best solution.
But of course, Rooney lacks Premier League managerial experience and so it would still be a gamble to give him the job.
And, Saturday’s loss at home to Villa really was another disaster. The situation is very serious with a team that is lacking any sort of form and confidence and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know where the next point is coming from.
Given all that, could the only viable solution be to give the job to someone who has a proven track record of rescuing teams from relegation and who has done it before with Everton?
That of course is Sam Allardyce. The manager everyone loves to hate has a record of peforming near-miracles and keeping seemingly doomed sides up.
He took over at Goodison Park in December 2017 when the Blues were in freefall after Ronald Koeman’s reign had ended and relegation looked a possibility at that time too.
His football was crude and painfull on the eye, but he did what he’s basically always done making the Toffees hard to beat and stabalized things on the pitch with the team eventually finishing in eighth place.
Frankly, at the moment an eighth place finish would feel like winning the league with Everton now in freefall and dangerously close to the trapdoor.
With no clear frontrunner and the club seemingly as far away as ever from knowing what exactly they want from a new manager with so many contradictory types of candidates, might the best solution be to return to Allardyce until the end of the season?
I know it would be a tough pill to swallow having fireman Sam back in the dugout and it’s true he didn’t succeed in his last Premier League job at West Bromwich Albion.
But, if he can keep the team up (and he’s probably the best bet to do that with better players than at West Brom) then the club will have the time to sort out their ‘strategic review’, whatever exactly that is, find a new Director of Football and try at last to get the right long-term managerial appointment in place.
At the moment Allardyce is not being mentioned in any media rumours and so I doubt he’s even on the club’s radar this time around. In any case he might not want to return even if he was asked.
The worry is though that despite whatever qualities they may possess, none of the other candidates have that relegation-fighting nous and experience and after Saturday’s defeat it really does feel that Everton are facing an almighty battle to get out of this mess.