What do Sam Allardyce and Kendall Jenner have in common?

When Big Sam first came to Everton, we had a noticeable bump in results. So much so, that it was almost like Everton was being led by a Star Wars character. If you’ll remember in the prequel movies, Jar Jar Binks was always the epitome of clumsy, and half the time his incompetence endangered his allies and sometimes it caught his enemies so off guard that victory was achieved for the good guys.

Often, Everton fans have been left wondering what on earth Sam Allardyce is thinking, and we may finally have a clue to that in a report that gives the Blues manager something in common with “Why is she famous, again?” star Kendall Jenner - they both practice transcendental meditation (TM).

Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

TM is a practice designed to give a person a state of what is described as ‘restful alertness’, which may well describe why Big Sam looks like he’s half asleep three quarters of the time. Allardyce does not represent the first Merseyside connection to this practice, as the Beatles were well known practitioners in the late ‘60s (Was Sam ‘listening’ to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds when he played three DMs against Bournemouth?).

Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

In the article linked above, a study was done at the Maharishi University of Management in the United States, a college in Iowa with 256 students. The study involved 16 people, which isn’t exactly what I would consider a convincing sample size (kind of like how people were sold on Big Sam after his first 3-4 games) and that study concluded that blood flow to the brain improved with the practice. Most practitioners use TM for about ten minutes at a time.

If what we see on the Everton pitch is Big Sam with a clearer head, please oh please don’t let anyone stop him because I would hate to see what would happen if his brain wasn’t clear. We’ve all complained about him showing up late to press conferences, but if he’s late because he’s trying to use TM to put two semi-coherent thoughts together, it is what it is.

The good news for Sam is that he should have plenty of time to meditate when Everton throws him out on his backside this summer and he’s watching the World Cup (that at one point he was supposed to be coaching England in) from a yoga mat somewhere very far away from Goodison Park.