With Allardyce, I wonder whether Boltons limitations - their lack of money in particular, as well as the relative lack of pressure at the club - actually helped him. It meant he had to take risks on what quality he could get - players like Okocha who were available for nothing but who had the ability to play in the Premiership. At Newcastle, with a bit more money, his signings have been poor - we spent £18 million on Smith, Barton and Enrique, of whom the first is one of the worst players Ive seen wear the shirt; the second is equally limited, currently under arrest, only a disgrace to the club; and the latter player is one that Allardyce shows no faith in. The signs are that, with money, he will be able to expose his limitations to the full, and will bring in similarly limited players, overpriced, supposedly proven Premiership tough-nuts.
Ive given my views on Robson and Viana before. For me, Robson did a fantastic job for us in his first three years in charge, but unfortunately undid a lot of the good work in his last year and a half at the club. There is an argument that our decline even started from the last six or seven games of the season in which we finished third - certainly, in the following season, though we finished fifth still, it was clear that things were crumbling; our performances waned drastically; Robson made increasingly poor and, in my view, biased and arrogant decisions; his post match interviews presented a confused manager, failing to admit obvious flaws, constantly defending some players and deriding others; and the team spirit and the respect between the players and the manager seemed to fall apart.
I tend to side with Puro when it comes to Nobbys ability. I think its easy to undervalue his worth, and in seeing a few of West Hams games this season, Im only more convinced as to what a clever footballer he is and to the positive effect he has on the teams he plays for. Besides from having a great knack for scoring and being one of the most creative players in the league, he is such a clever and technically gifted player that he improves the football of the entire team, makes the team flow better.
Things were going downhill before Nobby left, but his sale symbolised more than anything else what was going on, and it exacerbated the situation. It must also be remembered that Robson had stopped playing him regularly even from late on in the previous season, replacing him with Darren Ambrose then also with Lee Bowyer after the summer - two players who never had a quarter of Nobbys quality, whilst Lee Bowyer couldnt play at all on the wing - and that this was at least somewhat to blame for our failings on the pitch.
I dont agree that we embodied mad pace and physical power at the time - we did have a balanced squad, but it was balanced in the sense that we had a good mix of youth and experience and had plenty of players in the team who were good footballers. We didnt have a lot of power in the squad, we did have a lot of pace - but the pace of the likes of Dyer and Bellamy was complemented and made valuable by the intelligence of Solano, Shearer, Speed. Robson not only disrupted the balance on the pitch when he stopped playing Solano, but he removed one of the more experienced and well liked players from the squad. The fact that he did this, added to the sale of Speed in the following summer - Speed being replaced by Nicky Butt, who, besides from being an inferior replacement in terms of ability, has never shown any of the sort of leadership qualities that Speed had - and the rumours about Shearers departure lead me to wonder whether Robson was trying to exert too much control over the club, wanting to build a team of (English) youngsters that would be all his own, which ended up damaging the team. I respect Robson hugely, I admire his achievements abroad, but I also think he was a supremely arrogant manager at times.
Regardless, Nobbys sale showed a certain nasty side to Robson, and he was cast aside completely when he chose to start playing for Peru again. And I do believe, like I say, that Robson, at least in his last year and a half, started to strongly favour English players just because they were English. Lua Lua, despite, during Bellamys frequent absences, being a better partner for Shearer than Ameobi was, started to never get any opportunities - and I wonder whether this had anything to do with the fact he chose during this time to play for the Congo rather than to wait for an England opportunity. Laurent Robert (and I agree with Kimbo on his level of ability) was often made an easy scapegoat for poor performances, whilst players like Jenas and Dyer would never face criticism, would never be dropped no matter how poorly they played.
Similarly, Viana never got the chances he deserved for Newcastle. Its true that all of Speed, Jenas and Dyer were ahead of him in his time at the club - but Speed had a couple of long periods out injured, Dyer was injured frequently, and Jenas was often dreadful for us in that season in which we finished fifth - as I say, the latter two, despite poor performances, were undroppable. Viana wasnt given a lot of opportunities when people were injured, and when they werent he wasnt given a kick despite impressing in his early days at the club. I certainly agree that Viana quickly displayed a superior footballing brain and passing ability to pretty much everyone else in the squad. And I do think the Ronaldo comparison is somewhat instructive. Its true that Ronaldo always had the pace that meant he could adapt easier to the Premiership. It remains that it took Ronaldo time to adapt; that, upon joining the Premiership, Viana was more of a finished product as well as being the superior player; that Ronaldo was given time and games by Ferguson, whilst Robson made no attempt to help Viana adapt.
For me, Viana easily possessed (and possesses, though we set back his development hugely) the ability and the brain to succeed in the Premiership, and he did look very good in the Premiership in his earlier games for Newcastle. After just a few games there were regular 'Hugo, Hugo' chants at the ground - Newcastle fans can recognize ability. But Robson favoured Jenas and Dyer (and then Bowyer too) to a ridiculous, undeserved extent, and as Viana went months without first team games his confidence and his match fitness declined, and towards the end of his second season, in the few matches he did play, he was also made a scapegoat once or twice by Robson. Essentially, we made the very worst of what we had - whatever view is taken, I think its very unfair to suggest Viana couldnt cope as a footballer in the Premiership.
Again, for me, the mess we are in at the moment is due to us not sacking Robson soon enough. He should have gone in the summer - the fact that he didnt go then allowed all the problems of the previous season to grow and to boil over, and we were left early in the season with a team down at the bottom end of the table, with a squad in disarray, and with little time to find a new manager - of which few were available. So we brought in Souness, which was always the wrong appointment; we brought in Roeder; and now Allardyce is proving the worst of the lot. If we had said goodbye to Robson in that summer, had looked around for a proper manager then with more time and more availability, we would (most likely) be in a much better situation today.
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