Well, Allardyce has links to them and, in terms of doing the job of keeping teams in the top flight with limited resources, is actually damned good at what he does.
The trouble is, the pay-off is the playing style of his teams. Given WBA have a hard-won and much-admired reputation for playing football, I don't think Allardyce is the man.
I've completely changed my opinion of Hodgson's managerial abilities. I thought he was a good manager, and that he'd inherited a poor Liverpool squad. Since Dalglish has taken over, he's changed the formation & tactics to suit the existing players much better (even varying the style of play to neuter Chelsea, but still provide enough of an attacking focus to get the win). I've always pinned the blame for the start of Liverpool's decline on Dalglish's first reign, when he brought in substandard players to replace those retiring/leaving (leaving Souness with a total rebuilding task... at which he failed abysmally), but I've had a guarded change in opinion.
What it shows is that Hodgson doesn't have a suitably wide repetoir of managerial tactics and gameplans. His way worked at Fulham, but he couldn't adapt it sufficiently to make it work at Liverpool. Too safety-first and an inferior mentality. So again, I don't think he'd be the right bloke to take over West Brom
Martin
Home: St Helens (26m asl) Work: Manchester (75m asl)
A TWO addict since 14/12/01
"How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics."
Aneurin Bevan