Sam Allardyce Risks Digging His England Career an Early Grave With Misguided Rooney Comments
Hold the front page - England are still a pretty average football team. More specifically, England are the same average football team.
Sunday's game against Slovakia was supposed to be a clean break from the Hodgson era, a chance to show immediate improvements just a couple of months after a frustrating draw with the same opponents at Euro 2016.
Adam Lallana's late goal saw Sam Allardyce start with a win but England's issues remain: https://t.co/KwLr3IHdvN pic.twitter.com/1doSoO9fVU
Instead, England rolled out more of the same. Wayne Rooney remained captain of a side which looked almost identical to the one which was levered out of Euro 2016 by Iceland over the summer, and it took a 95th minute prod from Adam Lallana to prevent the same result again.
Allardyce's team was supposed to be uninspiring but efficient. This was just uninspiring.
Football managers have found - now more than ever - that they are defined as much by what they say in the press as by what they do on the pitch. Hodgson's low moment came after the Slovakia game at the Euros, which saw his side through to the last 16 to face Iceland.
9 - Sam Allardyce's debut win means the last 9 permanent England managers have won their first game in charge of the Three Lions. Routine.
His takeaway after the game? "We're not doomed yet." It was just about the worst thing he could have said, managing to pack pessimism and doubt into each and every one of the four words, which would surely have sealed his fate, even if England had made it past Iceland and into the quarter-finals.
It's the same in other sports too, Peter Moores' "We'll have to look at the data" line from after England's cricket side were knocked out in the group stage of the 2015 World Cup is likely to haunt him for the rest of his career. The cruellest joke there? He never even said it, it was a misquote which spread like wildfire. Those are the breaks.
Sam Allardyce may have managed to outstrip both, as early as the end of his first game in the job. "Today Wayne played wherever he wanted to," he said. "I can't stop Wayne playing there."
"It's not for me to say where he's going to play."
Rooney was once a phenomenon and you have to respect the records he has but Jesus Christ, he is awful and detrimental to TWO teams now.
This shouldn't really come as a shock to somebody who's been a football manager for longer than some of his squad have been alive, but Jesus Christ, Sam - it is literally your job to tell your players where to play. That's why the FA hired you - and not Rooney - to coach the team.
He should've stopped there. He didn't. "I think that he holds a lot more experience at international football than me as an international manager."
It would be tempting to question the point of a manager who thinks his own players are better equipped to decide on the team's lineup than he is. Such a tempting question, in fact, that it's hard to see fans stopping asking it for as long as Rooney - ineffective again on Sunday - remains in the side.
Many more performances like the one in Trnava, especially if 95th minute winners fail to appear out of nowhere, and Allardyce's England dream could be dead. After all, how many managers survive admitting that they can't control their own team?
For more from Chris when he's not writing on 90min, follow him on Twitter at @ThatChris1209
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