His miracle by the Wear merely reaffirms those credentials. With Eddie Howe still too raw, despite a creditable first Premier League campaign at Bournemouth, Allardyce is the outstanding candidate to replace Hodgson should England crumble once again at a major tournament.  First, though, he ought to treat himself to a few weeks at his splendid villa on the Costa Blanca – funded, with a certain delicious irony, by his pay-off from Newcastle, whose relegation he has just helped seal. Never mind being a stone-age throwback, a resurgent Signor ‘Allardici’ could yet be the key to England’s future.  Sport in the 21st century rides roughshod over the worst the world can throw at it. Even on 9/11, with lower Manhattan in smouldering ruins, Arsenal were playing a Champions League group game against Real Mallorca. It champions a culture of vicarious grieving, with black armbands and minutes’ silence galore, but almost never does it have the decency to stop altogether.  So it will be with this summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, taking place in the shadow of a Zika epidemic. Over 80,000 cases of the virus, clinically linked to shrunken-head syndrome in babies and several neurological conditions in adults, have been recorded in Rio this year. Dr Amir Attaran, professor of public health at the University of Ottawa, explained this week in Time that it would be madness for the Olympics, with its accompanying mass migration, to go ahead in such a climate.  Naturally, the International Olympic Committee assure that all is well. Their web of financial interests mean they could scarcely say otherwise. The Games, by their blinkered logic, must go on.
For all his shaman-like gifts at disentangling struggling Premier League clubs from the bottom three, Sam Allardyce is fated never to escape his own caricature.