Sam Allardyce on holiday is responsible for some of the great football stories. First of all, there is this cracking clip of him dancing to Rihanna in Marbella.
And now we have a second.
Joey Barton's autobiography, No Nonsense, has been released this week, and has been entertaining, infuriating and moving the wider football public in equal measure.
Sportswriter Nick Miller has today tweeted his favourite excerpt from the book, and it pertains to an amazing story of Sam Allardyce on holiday.
Barton reveals that Allardyce was in the running for the Manchester City job before it was given to Sven Goran-Eriksson, using this nugget of information to meander into his quite fabulous recollection of Allardyce. Here it is:
Sam Allardyce on Holiday
In terms of our favourite line, we are torn between
Apparently, an arreting sight in a thing, and basted in suntan lotion, Sam was buried up to his neck in the sand as a forefit, while his team-mates played punk rock.
and
He became so hungry he ate 11 fried eggs in a single sitting when he was released.
Utterly glorious.
We assume he fried those eggs on his face.
Allardyce, by the way, is still the England manager (at least at the time of writing). His job currently hangs in the balance following the publication of this compromising video of him on the Telegraph website, wherein he advises businessmen how to get round transfer rules while criticising Roy Hodgson, Gary Neville, the FA and Prince Harry.
He may well lose his job over the revelations, so we may be hearing a lot more stories of Sam Allardyce on holiday in the near future.
As an aside, however, the above is the best piece of writing around Allardyce since the Telegraph's Jonathan Liew furnished us with this majesty:
