Veteran Premier League manager Sam Allardyce remembers a time one of his players refused to play for him, and it was a man currently in charge of a top flight club.
The 70-year-old took charge of Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn, West Ham, Sunderland, Crystal Palace, Everton, West Brom and Leeds in the Premier League.
He also had the briefest of stints in charge of England in 2016, which lasted just one match.
It is no surprise that Big Sam has experienced an awful lot in the game and when asked if a player had ever refused to play for him, he did have an example to hand.
Allardyce didn’t last long in his stint as Newcastle boss from May 2007 to January 2008, but it was a Magpies player who said he wouldn’t play for him – current Burnley boss Scott Parker.
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‘Scott did it when I was at Newcastle,’ Allardyce told the No Tippy Tappy Football podcast on whether a player had ever refused to play for any of his clubs.
‘It wasn’t too bad. It was a straightforward, I need to leave and you need to get rid of me as quickly as you possibly can.
‘And I’d only been in the job for, I don’t know, a day, two days. And I think that there were two reasons for that. I understood the first reason, which was he felt that the Newcastle fans didn’t like him.
‘And the Newcastle fans, if they don’t like what they see, show their disapproval, rightly so. But they also get behind you extremely well, if they do like what you do. And so I was faced with the fact that they, I think it was his first, he’d only been there one season.
‘Good player, of course, obviously. And what do you do? Can’t stay here, can’t cope with it, need to move.’
Allardyce has spoken about Parker’s departure from St James’ Park before, telling the Mirror in 2010: ‘Fan pressure there is hostile towards the players.
‘They don’t really support the team as they should, they’re very critical and the players can’t handle that. That’s what Scott Parker couldn’t cope with. He said he couldn’t play at Newcastle.’
Parker has also admitted that he had to leave, such was his feeling that the fans in Newcastle had turned on him after a positive start after joining the club from Chelsea.
‘I went up to Newcastle and was playing some of my best football,’ Parker said in 2020. ‘Every week I gave nothing but my everything and ended up being captain of that football club.
‘In a very, very short space of time, it changed very, very quickly for me. It went the other way, for some reason.
‘Obviously, we were in a bit of a bad turn at the time in terms of results but nothing that was too much of a crisis. It did turn and before you know it, I had to leave.’
Parker left for West Ham in the summer of 2007 after two seasons and 73 games for Newcastle.