SAM ALLARDYCE is a good football manager but that does not mean he is good enough to lead the English international team to the promised land.

Actually, that’s not quite true. If the English FA are happy with coasting through qualification, helped by the fact their team are always seeded first, win a friendly here and there against a top side, but then fail whenever a tournament comes around, which has been the pattern for years now, then Big Sam may well be their man.

However, if tangible success is a job requirement of the former Sunderland, Newcastle United, West Ham and Bolton Wanderers manager, who has won not a single meaningful trophy throughout his entire 22-year managerial career, then the appointment of the 61-year-old is an odd decision.

There is nothing to suggest he will succeed where others have failed. Why would Allardyce get the best, or at least better, from a group of over-rated millionaires who clearly see international football as a step down and therefore time and again fall short, when ?

Of the current squad, only the ageing Wayne Rooney and Gary Cahill have won the Champions League. Few of those who were in France have any long-term experience of Europe’s premier competition. There are quite a few who have won nothing at all. Not even a League Cup.

Allardyce is a pragmatist. Nothing wrong with that when you're at Bolton but this lack of guile meant he was chased out of West Ham, where he did quite well, and he didn’t even last a season at Newcastle who it is said ended up paying him £6million to go quietly, so appalled where the locals by the football served up.

Perhaps that is what England need. A manager who keeps it simple and makes sure the players know what is required of them. But surely every opponent, and that includes Scotland in the upcoming World Cup qualifiers, will soon work out how to neutralise the long ball back-to-front functional football.

Allardyce is all about not losing. That is first and foremost. After that his side will try to win. That is okay for, erm, Scotland, but not a country who have some hope, at least they used to, of making at least a quarter-final of a major tournament.

He will not be helped by the fact English football is full of foreign players, particularly at the bigger clubs, and this is a problem which is only going to get worse.

Here is what one well known manager had to say only this year about the England team and how it is being held back by the Premier League.

"The biggest problem for England is the Premier League -- it's bigger than the international stage I talked about players' fatigue from still not having a winter break. I always voted for it."

And from the same man about the intense media pressure put on anyone charged with leading the Three Lions; “You have to live with that. If you don’t want it, don’t go for it. If you do want it, you know what’s coming your way. I spoke to Bobby Robson and Graham Taylor. They said, ‘It’s the finest job to ever have, don’t turn it down if you get the opportunity, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you do.’"

This was Allardyce himself, quoted in a book about why the job of managing the English national team is an “impossible job.” This, of course, is a ridiculous tag. It is not close to an impossibility to go into a tournament knowing your team, formation and tactics.

It is surely easy-ish to install a team spirit within the squad, work out who is playing well, put them in the team, work out who would rather be no the beach and send them there. Just because Roy Hodgson was hopeless at this does not mean a half-decent coach can’t quite sort out the basics.

Allardyce is right to say the Premier League, which is not too rich for its own good, is a hindrance and that the press, especially it must be said the written media, see England results and performances as an opportunity to sharper knives.

An English journalist once told me the reason the press pack never view England as anything other than in terms of black and white was that if they did not then the copy would be dull and, therefore, they weren’t going to sell newspapers.

“Put it this way,” he said. “The story is always the same. Qualifications is easy and then they mess up. Every time. To maintain interest and get people to buy the papers during these trying times, we have to be extreme.”

However, the real issue is that Allardyce is a six out of ten manager. He will save your club from relegation, as he did with Sunderland, he will win you promotion, which he achieved with Bolton and West Ham, but is that CV going to impress the average England international?

Allardyce has no experience of top level football, has never managed the biggest names and has takes over a group of players who in France seemed resigned to doing badly.

And when Scotland lose to England later this year, it will feel all the more galling when we take into consideration who their manager is.