Big challenges ahead for Big Sam

With 13 points from 11 games, they are stationed in the lower half of the lower half of the Premier League. It is underwhelming, but far from unacceptable. Nevertheless, a month later the manager goes.

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Sam Allardyce: Hopes to be back for Carling Cup game

That was November 2008 and this is November 2009, but while Blackburn Rovers have an identical return in the league, there are marked differences. Paul Ince, after his six-month sabbatical in deepest Lancashire, is back at Milton Keynes Dons now and Blackburn are passing under the radar whereas a year ago their former manager was first targeted and then ruthlessly struck down.

The reassuring presence of Sam Allardyce at the helm helps account for a very different attitude. So does the widespread assumption that the eventual occupants of the relegation zone will come from the three promoted clubs, Portsmouth and Hull. However, but for a second-half comeback against Pompey in their last match, Blackburn would have spent the international break in the bottom three.

Cause for panic? Not this year. Allardyce inherited a more precarious position 11 months ago, five points from safety, and steered Rovers to survival, just as he had won his relegation battles in his time at Bolton. There is a sense that his sides, if not too good to go down, then are at the least too knowing, too experienced and too adept at reaching the 38-point mark to be seriously endangered.

"It is about making sure you have got more points than games played," he said, explaining a commonsense approach to preserving their position. "We have and if that continues and you keep adding to the total, all of a sudden you have six games left you are safe."

So far, so conventional. Yet this is far from a typical Allardyce team. Indeed, in Sunday's reunion at the Reebok Stadium, Bolton may be the side with the stamp of Sam all over them. An uncompromising approach? Tick. The 4-5-1 formation he always insisted was actually 4-3-3? Tick. The talismanic presence of Kevin Davies, troubling defences with fearsome physicality? Tick.

Blackburn, in contrast, have the joint worst defensive record in the Premier League. They are the only club in English football without a single point on the road all season. Indeed, they have lost ten successive away league games. They are not the sort of statistics normally associated with Allardyce. Over six top-flight seasons at Bolton, his team lost less than half of their away games.

But then recreating past glories has proved problematic. The wrinkled were revived and reinvigorated at the Reebok Stadium, Allardyce extending the careers of such class acts as Fernando Hierro and Youri Djorkaeff. An attempt to stage a repeat has brought Michel Salgado to Blackburn, but it means Rovers' best-paid player is thought to be their third-choice right back.

At Bolton, Allardyce recruited astutely from the wealthiest clubs, handing their squad players pivotal roles. At Blackburn, Franco di Santo has exerted an influence after being borrowed from Chelsea, despite only scoring once. But the young Argentine is due to return to Stamford Bridge in January, leaving Blackburn's attack in a state of uncertainty. It heightens the importance of the next two months, because it is harder to identify who will provide the goals in the second half of the season.

David Dunn has flourished playing behind a solitary striker, but it has come to the detriment of Rovers' out-and-out forwards. Demoted to the bench, both Benni McCarthy and Jason Roberts are considering January moves: as the latter noted after the Portsmouth win, they were the pairing who helped Blackburn salvage their Premier League status last season.

That only leaves the callow Croatian Nikola Kalinic, bought after other targets, such as Peter Crouch and Pavel Pogrebnyak, eluded Allardyce. With neither winger, Morten Gamst Pedersen and El-Hadji Diouf, beginning the season in particularly destructive fashion, it means Dunn, scarcely a byword for fitness in recent seasons, has a vital role providing and scoring goals.

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David Dunn is a pivotal player for Blackburn Rovers

Allardyce excelled in making the most of his funds at Bolton during a deflationary period for transfer fees. At Ewood Park, however, there is a gradual reduction of both finances and expectations. Accustomed to top-ten finishes under Mark Hughes, they initially budgeted to come ninth under Ince. A 15th-place finish resulted in a shortfall. Now Rovers' ambitions have been quietly downgraded. Privately, there may be the recognition that survival equates to success.

While Hughes found high-class players for cut-price fees, they have started to drift away. Blackburn probably possessed a better squad last season, though they made a sizeable profit made from the sales of Stephen Warnock and Roque Santa Cruz.

Especially in the derby victory over Burnley, they have played better football than the stereotype of Allardyce as an advocate of the long-ball game indicates. Yet the aesthetics are not the major concern to a pragmatist. Portsmouth were overcome by a reversion to a more direct style in the second half. Though their five away games thus far - at Sunderland, Everton, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United - rank among the toughest of their season, Blackburn are yet to display the backbone to prevail on their travels.

So Sunday's game takes on an added significance. Discover the resilience with which Allardyce imbued his Bolton side and it will be proof Blackburn are too shrewd to go down. Lose and his former team may be following Allardyce's safety-first blueprint for survival rather better than his current charges.