Is Sam Allardyce just Jesse Marsch with a different accent?

Sam Allardyce has been in his element since taking over at Leeds United, in the thick of the attention with a grand opportunity to upset everybody's assumptions. His four game resurrection attempt is concentrated, intense, distilling Big Sam down to the elements, his chance to show people that he's not made of what you think he is, i.e., 60 per cent gravy.

United's performance at Manchester City did meet some expectations. They lost, for one. Also the team was defensive, the striker was lonely, the throws were long and so were the passes. "Every game means a clean sheet," Allardyce said yesterday, "because every successful club has the best clean sheet record," and although that wasn't achieved in Manchester it was clearly the aim, with keeping the score down to two (Haaland: none) a popular by-product.

This tactical shift, though, sounds more like a vibe shift when Allardyce describes his first week in the job.

"Even though my position is head coach, I am a manager and I manage people," he said after the game last week. "My biggest strength is making people feel better, making people do better for themselves, for the families, for the football club, for the supporters. It's one of my strengths in terms of man management. That's got nothing to do with coaching."

Allardyce is the archetypal tracksuit manager, yelling instructions and blowing his whistle while chewing his way through a block of Wrigley's. So it has been surprising to hear him talking so much about things that are not to do with working on the training ground.

"Mind is everything," he said before the City game, "and I have to control and talk to the players about controlling the mind, about mindfulness, about concentration on positive thinking. There's huge amounts of research about when you're not here [at the training ground], because when we're here, everything's going on about training, technically, tactically. You talk about the mindset and all that, but a player can bring themselves in a very good mindset by relaxing at home and starting to think positively about his game about how he plays his game, about when he played his best game, or who did he play against?

"He's putting these positive thoughts into his mind and he's getting himself better prepared to go out and play better ... Whether the player takes the time out when he gets home, we don't know, we can't say that really. We just hope that they do because it's proven by the research that it makes a difference."

This is not what many people were expecting from Big Sam at Leeds, and I'm sure he's enjoying that. He looks a lot happier, so far, sparring with the press than watching Marc Roca taking set-pieces. He has other tools at his disposal, and is definitely not averse to roping his back four together to teach positioning or blowing up with his version of a hairdryer to make his displeasure known. But those feel like pre-season ideas, when a coach has the luxury of setting the tone for the season in the long, stress-free sessions of summer. Allardyce doesn't have that luxury so has to be selective, and is selecting the method of the mind.

And this might be me reading too much into things, but by choosing this approach Allardyce might be making the most of what the players actually did do in pre-season. Because the more I listen to Sam Allardyce, the more I'm hearing Jesse Marsch. I remember particularly a quote Meg Swanick recorded from Marsch at a conference of football coaches in Philadelphia in January, amid what she noted was 'a room full of British sighs', when Marsch was talking about his coaching style and said: