Allardyce: I did a fantastic job at West Ham

Sam Allardyce’s side have failed to keep a clean sheet in their last 13 league and cup games, conceding a total of 27 goals.

Sunderland manager Sam Allardyce feels he did “a fantastic job” at West Ham as he prepares to return to his former club in the Premier League on Saturday.

“It is a more special game for Sam that he is coming back to the place, the stadium where he was the manager for a few years”.

“He took over West Ham in a moment when they were in the Championship and got them back straight away”.

Allardyce knows concentrating on keeping Sunderland in the Premier League is the only priority he faces in the short term, but he continues to monitor potential targets for the summer. Having said his new club, Sunderland, are supported by fans who are far more “lenient” when things go badly, Allardyce claimed the biggest challenge for him at Upton Park was trying to fix the damage done to morale by abuse from the terraces.

“Whoever says differently, then it’s not business, it’s personal”.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Martin Keown has praised Sam Allardyce for taking the Sunderland job, whilst predicting the reception that the manager will receive at the Boleyn Ground this weekend. “I think so, and I hope so”.

“The planned integration of these players back into the games is very important as they enter the final stages of their rehab/training/playing”.

But should the Hammers faithful boo Allardyce upon his return this weekend?

“I don’t think I could have done any better than I did”, he argued.

But the 22-year-old eventually decided on a move to Slaven Bilic’s side, and he’s very happy with the choice he made. Even when we’ve not been winning games at home and losing what I’ve tried to show is that the players are really committed to getting the right results, even though we haven’t.

“I took a break and came out of it completely and see whether my time was up, whether I wanted to put myself through the stresses and strains of this job again and obviously it didn’t take too long for me to decide that I did!”