IN some ways, Sam Allardyce is a cat. A big, cuddly tomcat, who ends up in Schrodinger’s famous experiment. For those who don’t remember, Schrodinger’s cat was an unlucky feline who gets put in a box with a flask of poison that is then shattered.

Schrodinger’s paradox was that, until you open the box, you can’t definitively say whether the cat is alive or dead. He exists in two states. Which, of course, is absurd and impossible.

So too does the new England boss, whose side take on Slovakia this afternoon. Allardyce is a walking, talking contradiction.

Spend time with him and he is well-rounded, erudite, even professorial by footballer standards. For a long time, he was on the cutting edge of technology and innovation, from setting up a state-of-the-art medical department back in his Bolton Wanderers days to assembling a group of cutting edge data analysts.

And, for all the criticism his brand of football gets – agricultural is perhaps one of the kindest adjectives thrown his way – he also has a history of cramming talented individual players into functional sides, always with a cosmopolitan bent; not many would think to shoe-horn Jay Jay Okocha, Hidetoshi Nakata and El Hadji Diouf in the same XI.

And then you get the flip side.

1 The silly notion that if he had a foreign sounding name – “Sam Allardici” for example – he would be managing a top-four side.

No, actually. David Moyes, Brendan Rodgers, Harry Redknapp, Tim Sherwood, Mark Hughes and Sir Alex Ferguson all managed top-four calibre sides in the past seven years. None of their names end in vowels.

2 The flag-waving jingoism, but only when it’s convenient.

When he wrote a column for the News of the World, he regularly put himself forward as a prospective England boss and noted just how scandalous it was that the Football Association should look to the likes of foreigners like Fabio Capello and Sven-Goran Eriksson.

Now he is in charge, he wants the FA to look at naturalising foreign players who become eligible for British passports based on residency, with Steven Nzonzi, of all people, among his early – and unsuccessful – targets.

3 The insistence that his teams play not just good football, but attractive, entertaining football as well.

Admittedly, this is more of a subjective one. But when you play more long balls than anyone in the league and then insist that those are “long passes” and not “long balls” you are rather clutching at straws.

Allardyce can do this – and get away with it to the degree that he becomes England coach – because his supporters make up a broad church.

When he talks to a certain type, it’s all about jingoism, us versus them (on the naturalisation issue: “They all do it”, which is both untrue and not a justification), about being sensible and not being sucked in by the fancy dans.

And when he addresses a different type, it’s the science, the tactical organisation, the willingness to learn from others.

In short, he can be all things to all people. That’s not a bad quality for a politician and it’s a useful skill for an England coach too. Because, in fact, coaching your country is above all a sales job.

You only need to look at his predecessor, Roy Hodgson. Two group stages spread over two major tournaments, a quality of football that ranged from poor to indifferent, under-performing stars and, still, he sold the nation and the FA on the idea that England were on the “right track”. And then they go and lose to Iceland. That is where the bar is set right now. Pretty darn low.

Allardyce, for all his flaws, can replicate those results in his sleep. Like Hodgson, he has the added bonus that, if the FA continue to limit themselves to English coaches, the competition is rather slim at least until Gareth Southgate develops some charisma, Alan Pardew stops self-destructing, Eddie Howe grows up and Gary Neville persuades us that those six months in Spain’s La Liga at Valencia never happened.

Until then, he is home free. He has enough talent everywhere, bar central defence, to waltz his way to the World Cup. And he has enough time to mold the England side into whatever he wants it to be.

That’s not a bad position in which to find yourself. At least for the next few major tournaments.

We like big, round, simple numbers but even that was taken to an extreme during Sky Sports News Transfer Deadline Day extravaganza.

As one clock in the corner of the screen counted down towards the window “slamming shut” (it never gently closes), another counted up, recording the total amount of money spent by Premier League clubs.

When it went past a billion pounds, you almost expected fireworks and emojis to flood the screen, like some kind of charity telethon.

The funny thing was just how empty, and meaningless, the number was. More than £400 million of that £1.1 billion was spent within the Premier League. It’s purely cash re-circulating. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if Club A sells Player X to Club B for £20m and then Club B sells Player Y to Club A, the total spend is £40m, but the net spend is zero.

The sad thing is that the overall impact of the story was missed. What matters is the Premier League’s net spend approached £700m. Which means that amount left the league and went to bankroll other competitions, both foreign leagues and lower divisions.

Or, to put another way, the average Sky and BT Sport viewer is among those helping to pay for La Liga, Serie A and the Bundesliga.

Globalisation at work.