Dealing with players who have gone out for a night on the town the evening before a game is the kind of thing that Premier League managers don’t expect to have to deal with.
Even 20 or 30 years ago, being seen out in public on the eve of a game was a big no-no.
How Sam Allardyce brought El-Hadji Diouf back down to earth
Sam Allardyce enjoyed his greatest success as Bolton Wanderers manager (Image credit: Getty Images)Speaking on the BBC’s ‘Wayne Rooney Show’, Allardyce gave an example of when he made his man management skills work for him.
The then-Bolton manager counted the notorious El-Hadji Diouf among his playing staff at the time following his infamously ill-disciplined spell at Liverpool.
Sam Allardyce gave El-Hadji Diouf an ultimatum after he was caught out on the town (Image credit: Getty Images)Allardyce said: “Dioufy’s [gone] out [on the town] on the Friday night. So I’m coming in Saturday, we’re playing at home, and we’ve got a phone call: ‘Dioufy is out’.
“So Dioufy comes in, and I said: ‘You were out last night’. [He says:] ‘I wasn’t’.
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“I said: ‘Even worse, you were out in Bolton instead of Manchester. I know you were out, because only you can afford Louis Roederer Cristal [Champagne], nobody else in Bolton can’ – he’d been buying all his chums Louis Roederer Cristal!
“Everybody’s saying: ‘you’ve got drop him’.
“So I said [to him], ‘You’ve got half an hour’. [He said:] What do you mean?’.
“I said, ‘you’ve got half an hour, and if you’re playing bad, I’m going to bring you off, put the subs on, and go to the press and say ‘I found out he was out on a Friday night.'”
“Man of the match.”
Diouf scored 24 goals in 136 appearances for Bolton, and Allardyce went on to manage Diouf again at Blackburn Rovers.
