Newcastle: Allardyce "Almost" Signed Modric, Jagielka & Ivanovic

There are few constants in football: players will always want to follow the money, managers will blame everything but themselves and club owners will penny pinch no matter where they are - taxes aren't even reliable now. But one thing you can always count on is the "wisdom" of Sam Allardyce: as soon as there's any big topic to talk about, you can pretty much guarantee that the West Ham boss will be there offering his "expert" thoughts. And that usually counts doubly for Newcastle United because the manager seems to think that he was badly done to at the club. He still thinks he would have been able to turn the club into the European power Mike Ashley initially said he wanted, and no matter how many stats or terrible signings you put in front of him, there would be no telling him. But still the papers go to Allardyce to see how England should be managed, or which big teams he thinks he should have been allowed to manage - with quips about his name holding him back. And today, the latest round of his unwanted philosophy has emerged in the Express where he has moaned about the fact that he was never allowed to use Newcastle as a stepping stone to a bigger club:

"It ended up where I couldn't get that bigger or better club, so I think there must have been something in my career that stopped me. I think it was Newcastle. Had that been successful with Freddy Shepherd, the man who appointed me, staying on, I might have got an even bigger club than Newcastle. "I don't blame Mike Ashley, because when you pay that amount for a football club and you know what you want to do with it, sometimes you like to get rid of the furniture you have inherited."

Glad to see he was wholly committed to Newcastle. Perhaps he should evaluate his performance, rather than complaining about what could have been? In among these nuggets of information, Allardyce also claimed that Mike Ashley stood in the way of his real Newcastle revolution as he had been geared towards recapturing the successes of the Kevin Keegan era before the purse strings were slapped out of his hands:

"With Mike taking over those funds never materialised. I had lined up moves for Phil Jaglielka, Luka Modric and Branislav Ivanovic - people on my Bolton recruitment database. Not big stars but quality players and with the finances I was being promised at Newcastle, we could have done something."

"Lined up moves"? Forgive me if I take that with a pinch of salt - particularly since Modric almost signed under Keegan - but that's Allardyce down to a tee: he is a nearly man, protected from ever having to defend his failures because he always has an excuse that shifts the blame. "If I had this and this, things would have been better." Sound familiar? It should, because we currently have a manager just like him.