Comic masterpiece
Allardyce's status as the frontrunner for the England job reflects a mad year
Historians will look back at 2016 and think it was a made-up year, with newspapers and textbooks written by pranksters.
Two men with silly hair, one wild and white, the other with a hairstyle dragged across his head, ran for power.
Donald Trump went for the US presidency. In Britain, Boris Johnson, the human mop, said there were too many foreigners and was rewarded with the foreign secretary job.
Britain dropped out of Europe and then, when the pound fell faster than Roy Hodgson's reputation, pretended that it was all a bit of a gag.
They were only kidding. Could they please come back to Europe now?
The Three Lions did pretty much the same at Euro 2016, playing so badly that the performances appeared to be part of an elaborate in-joke. The punchline was Harry Kane taking corners.
And then, Icelandic Vikings showed up with the carcasses of mutilated Englishmen, throwing their arms up and clapping in some strange tribal rhythm.
From a distance, it looked like the cast of Game of Thrones performing YMCA.
Meanwhile, Portugal won a football trophy without "winning" football matches.
They simply stood back until everyone ran for the exits screaming, "my eyes, my eyes", throwing themselves onto rusty spikes to avoid watching another sideways pass across the halfway line.
MAD WORLD
The world went mad, as if reason and logic had vanished and we were all living in this parallel universe of insanity.
And then, the madness moved into another dimension.
Sam Allardyce was revealed as the leading contender for the England job.
Seasoned West Ham fans have already taken the necessary precautions, buying blindfolds for all future England fixtures.
Masochistic freaks immediately put up their torture chambers on eBay and bought Wembley season tickets instead.
Kevin Nolan, recently sacked as player-coach at Leyton Orient, delayed retirement plans and announced that he was ready to resurrect his old strike partnership with big Andy Carroll.
At West Ham, Carroll and Nolan were the last comedy duo to perform Big Sam's legendary routines, which were rather like flared trousers.
They were championed in the Seventies, but dropped out of fashion soon after, with guilty parties quickly denying their existence.
But Big Sam is an old-fashioned, uncomplicated manager. He likes his men big and their balls high.
He has a reputation for being a ground-breaking coach for introducing Prozone stats to training sessions.
But mostly, it's because he used to wear one of those earpiece and microphone headsets that he borrowed from Burger King so he could pick up a Whopper on the way home.
If he really liked the Whopper, he stuck it up front with Nolan.
WAY FORWARD
Clearly, after England displayed no wit, invention, creativity, tactical awareness, subtlety, cohesion or adaptability at Euro 2016, the only intelligent way forward was to get the comical Lions to interact with a giraffe up front.
It's not so much a football match as it is an animated scene from Madagascar.
The coaching guile of Antonio Conte, Joachim Loew and Fernando Santos, along with the youth development revolutions in Belgium, Germany and even Iceland, hinted at where England might be going wrong.
But what do they know?
Older managers like Allardyce, Steve Bruce and Harry Redknapp, with all their coaching success at international level, knew exactly what was wrong.
The Three Lions had lost the English spirit. England can't win a raffle without their English spirit and Allardyce is the answer, apparently.
He knows how to get back that elusive English spirit, as if he carries it around in a perfume bottle like those sales girls on cosmetics counters, squirting it at Wayne Rooney's armpits whenever the skipper steps out of the shower.
The English Football Association folks showed a real flair for comedy when they appointed Hodgson, but Allardyce hints at a future comic masterpiece.
In fairness, he isn't the worst man for the England job. But Donald Trump wasn't really interested.
I was in Glenn’s (Hoddle) camp… but I will be delighted if Sam (Allardyce) gets it. Sam is a good man. He has plenty of knowledge, he will have plenty of enthusiasm for the job, so I will have no problems if Sam gets the job.
- Former Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp on the vacant England manager job
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