Culture club's steady hand arrows in on his safe target

The Sam Allardyce Interview: A man who badly needs points feels at home on the oche. Nick Townsend finds there is more to the Bolton manager than meets the bull's-eye

Sam Allardyce strips off his tracksuit top, baring a tanned and still muscled torso – well, pretty impressive for a man of 48 – as he undergoes a swift change of persona. From that acknowledged relegation scrapper "Big Sam" of Bolton Wanderers, he reappears, in sub-Superman style, in a less familiar guise: arrows chucker, "The Dark Dudley Destroyer".

In truth, it doesn't have quite the auth-entic effect, because posing for promotional photographs with the former world darts champion Phil "The Power" Taylor and his conqueror John Part, who both boast a certain amount of midriff ballast, the football manager's comparatively lean frame is in danger of damaging the credibility of darts.

In all honesty, he would rather his football team had been engaged in a Premier-ship game at home to Tottenham yesterday afternoon, but television demands decreed that the game was delayed until tomorrow night. So The Destroyer went looking for points on the board at the UK Open regional final at the Royal Oak, Manchester, while quietly hoping that Wanderers' relegation rivals were dropping them.

"At least it'll take my mind off what's happening in the Premiership," he says. "There's a lot of games where unfortunately you're hoping that certain teams don't do so well." Sadly, West Ham were not one of them. Their victory over Sunderland pushed Bolton into third from bottom place. To compound the disappointment, Allardyce as expected was eliminated from the competition by the Professional Darts Players' Association member Peter Castle – 5-0. Which is a pity, as the final will be staged at the Reebok. By then, Wanderers and Allardyce will know whether the stadium will host Premiership or Nationwide football next season.

For the present, there is not the slightest whiff of cyanide around the Reebok. The manager appears sanguine, his team, judged on an ultimately facile victory at the Stadium of Light last Saturday, are performing nervelessly and with the panache of a side who should be comfortably in mid-table. Yet he knows that any stumble could leave Wanderers' underbelly exposed to a sustained assault by the threatening footpads of West Ham.

Last season was equally fraught before safety was secured. You wonder if the Wanderers manager derives any strange, masochistic pleasure from being perpetually under pressure. "I don't thrive on it," he says with a sonorous laugh. "But I don't mind it. You have to learn to live with it and deal with it. We have put a certain pressure on ourselves, which we have had no need to do, but we have responded well at the death. We all know we should be well clear of the bottom four, but we're not.

"We're in the best form we've been in all season, so that's looking good for us. I don't see too many edgy performances from our players. We showed that with our composure and the performance under hugely difficult circumstances on Saturday. It was a first game on home soil for the messiah, the big saviour, Mick McCarthy, with 42,000 Mackems screaming for their team. But we managed to deflect that pressure back on them by scoring first."

There is a temptation to compartmentalise Allardyce, a hulking figure whose rather lugubrious features are suggestive of a serial misery, which is far from the truth. At times he carries the look of someone who you would no more want to remain in close proximity to than Hannibal Lecter. This is surely a man who would happily devour southern-softie journalists and over-sensitive foreign footballers with a bottle of chianti, isn't he?

After all, he has emerged from that finishing school of the archetypal hard man, The College of Ex-Central Defenders. His team will be highly disciplined, direct, preferring brute force to artistry, and the man in charge will rage like a sergeant-major at any sign of frailty, won't they?

Yet what you anticipate from Big Sam, a man born in Dudley but synonymous with Bolton, is decidedly not what you get. The nature of his team confirms that. When Allardyce set about acquiring players worldwide, the suspicion was that he would effectively throw them in the air like a jumble of jigsaw pieces and hope that they all fitted. In fact, his thinking was far more precise, and he has succeeded in assembling a picture where style and strength have been neatly balanced.

Jay-Jay Okocha and Youri Djorkaeff arrived on frees from Paris St-Germain and Kaiserslautern respectively. There have been men on loan, too, like Bernard Mendy, also from Paris St-Germain, so impressive last week, against Sunderland, and Ivan Campo from Real Madrid. At the time, there would have been a few raised eyebrows from within opposition managers' offices. Weren't they just mercenaries without a heart, players looking for an easy payday towards the culmination of their careers?

Allardyce refutes that contention, and the evidence supports him. "Youri came last year and showed that he wasn't like that," he says. "There was maybe a little doubt whether he was doing it just for us or to get in the World Cup. But he's been an ever-present this year and never ducked out of training. Ivan hadn't played any competitive football at Real for over 12 months and he took time to get to Premiership fitness, but in the last three or four games he's been absolutely outstanding. He is responsible for starting most of our forward movement. And Jay-Jay, well, he turns a game in your favour at any given moment, in a split second. When games get as tight as they do at this stage of the season, this is what you want."

You suggest that tomorrow's rivals, Tottenham, would like to wrest at least two of that trio, the Nigerian midfielder Okocha and veteran French international Djorkaeff, from him. He laughs again. "Ha, well, they were there for us all to get. It's about decisions, isn't it? You already know they've got great CVs, so I look at whether we can afford them, and if we can, we go and get 'em. Then we have a working environment that brings the best out of them. That's my responsibility, to make sure that whoever comes in feels comfortable and happy, whether he's played for Real Madrid or Bishop Auckland. We've had Jeff Smith from Bishop Auckland, playing with Youri Djorkaeff and Campo this year. That's the massive difference between the two cultures of our players at this club."

The signing of English players has been a rare occurrence and, significantly, not one home player was in the side that beat Sunderland. "We've had to strike a balance on whether we take these players for their talents and cope with the language problems or look for lesser talents who could speak English," Allardyce explained.

Still, for all the astute dealing that has produced such harmony on and off the pitch, there remains a dearth of goals. That fact most irks Allardyce. Oh for a man who could hit 20 with the consistency of Phil Taylor. Goals a season, that is. Belatedly, it appears that the Dane, Henrik Pedersen, may be the solution. "He's in his finest form. He's looking like a Premiership centre-forward and has got the potential to win games," says the manager. "There's been a big responsibility since Michael Ricketts went [to Middlesbrough]. But when you only spend 600 grand on a Premiership centre-forward, you do have your doubts."

Allardyce's security at the Reebok is probably rather greater than Hoddle's at White Hart Lane, where expectation perennially exceeds the reality of the club's financial situation. Tottenham, you suspect, may be particularly vulnerable at present.

"It's a dangerous scenario for us," is the Bolton man's counter-argument. "There's dissatisfaction among the Spurs fans and pressure starting to be exerted on Glenn Hoddle. He'll be kicking his players' backsides, saying: 'This is a great opportunity to get results back on track.'"

And will he consider his own position if the worst materialises and the Nationwide beckons? "No, because I don't think we'll go down," says Allardyce. "I carry on thinking that I'm going to be in the Premiership. If it does come around I'll have to try to deal with it. But I don't want to let those thoughts creep in, because it might make me a bit negative."

On recent evidence there is no chance of that. Unless he is standing on the oche. For Allardyce, double tops might just come a bit harder than avoiding the bottom three.

Biography: Sam Allardyce

Born: 19 October 1954 in Dudley.

As a player: Centre-half who turned pro in 1971 and enjoyed spells at Bolton, Sunderland, Millwall, Coventry, Huddersfield, Preston and West Brom, as well as a brief spell at Tampa Bay.

As a manager: Blackpool (1994-96) 102 matches, won 44, lost 35, drawn 23. Notts County (1997-99) 145 matches, won 56, lost 50, drawn 39. Bolton (1999 to present) 177 matches, won 70, lost 53, drawn 54. Also coaching stints at Preston and Sunderland and Limerick as manager.

Managerial honours: Second Division play-offs with Blackpool (1996). Third Division title with Notts County (1998). FA Cup semi-final, First Division play-offs with Bolton (1999). Promotion with Bolton (2001).