BIG SAM thought the big job might have passed him by.
But today Sam Allardyce is set to become the England manager — the realisation of a dream which was crushed ten years ago when he lost out to Steve McClaren.
Allardyce passionately believed he should have been installed as the successor to Sven-Goran Eriksson back in 2006 and it is a sore which has festered ever since.
By the time we sat down to put together his autobiography a year ago, that sore was still causing him great discomfort. Out of work having left West Ham, he was even contemplating retirement.
But England gnawed away in the back of his brain.
He was sure he would have got the national side to the Euro 2008 finals — where McClaren had failed to do so — and he thought the FA had been wrong to turn next to Fabio Capello.
“The England job should be for an Englishman,” was his view.
He couldn’t let it go.
As he relaxed at his Spanish villa mulling over the future, last summer he told me: “Being a national team boss still intrigues me and that could be what entices me back.
“I had a shot at the England job, impressed in the interview but missed out. I should have got it and, as I’m a better manager now than I was then, I believe I should be in the running when it comes round again.
“That’s not vanity or being full of my own importance. My track record entitles me to being considered.
“Of course, I could manage a different country altogether. We’ll see what opportunities come along.”
Allardyce knew he didn’t have a hope of fulfilling his England ambition if he did not clamber back on to the management ladder.
It was that nagging desire deep down to stick it to all the doubters that persuaded him to return with relegation-haunted Sunderland.
He knew — if he did a good job at the Stadium of Light — his chance, however remote, might come again.
Having kept Sunderland up in style last season, his stock was on the rise once more.
The fact the England vacancy came up so soon surprised him though.
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He thought it would not arise until after the next World Cup but Roy Hodgson’s miserable failure at Euro 2016 opened the door and he has charged through it.
I have known Big Sam for 25 years from the time he was struggling as a youth team coach at Preston and was fighting to keep the family home after a pub business collapsed — this is a man who has not had it easy.
He is a dyslexic whose affliction was not diagnosed until his mid-30s and he has had well-documented heart trouble, which required a stent inserting in a valve when he was boss of Blackburn.
He has fought for everything he has achieved in football.
Yet Allardyce, 61, admits it could have been over almost before it started when, after just missing out on the play-offs with Blackpool in the mid-1990s, he got another chance at Notts County.
The team was headed for the drop and he did not win any of his first 18 games.
Allardyce told me: “Had I got the bullet after that run of results, I might never have got another job.”
Fortunately for Big Sam, he turned it all around and brought County back up with a record points and goals total. From there he was off and running.
He achieved miracles with Bolton and made them a Premier League force against all the odds.
Then came the 2007 move to Newcastle, which he saw as a natural progression to the top. But Mike Ashley took over as owner three weeks after he was installed and sacked him seven months later.
Allardyce said: “If ever there was a right club at the wrong time it was Newcastle United.”
Blackburn, West Ham and Sunderland were to follow but he worried that Newcastle might be as good as it was ever going to get.
Big Sam’s outgoing personality belies his attributes as one of football’s great thinkers and innovators.
He has been ahead of the opposition for years when it comes to player analysis and the latest training techniques.
That is something the FA’s technical director Dan Ashworth will be especially keen to tap into.
Make no mistake, he will not be daunted by task ahead.
Allardyce, a no-nonsense centre-back, did not play for England — but as a manager he has long convinced he is international class.
He has never had an inferiority complex and has always revelled in giving a bloody nose to managerial rivals like Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger, Rafa Benitez or his pal Sir Alex Ferguson, who was backing him for the job.
Now he has the toughest challenge of all, restoring England’s pride.
Big Sam’s Three Lions certainly won’t lack passion — he will make sure of that.
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