WHEN it comes to football ideas, Sam Allardyce is more a trend setter than a follower of fashion.

You do not keep a modestly sized club like Bolton Wanderers up in the Premiership on a shoestring budget for four years without doing something different.

And when some of the rest, including many of the best, start to copy you, you know you are on to something good.

That is certainly the case with tactics as the flexible 4-3-3 formation Allardyce introduced to the Premiership has become adopted by many of his rivals.

The copycat culture may be a flattering sign of Allardyces technical knowhow. But it appears to be having a negative impact on Wanderers as teams begin to learn how to combat the style which has helped them become established in the big league.

While most teams played a traditional 4-4-2 formation some years ago, Allardyce was honing his 4-3-3 system which turns into 4-5-1 when defending.

He first adopted it in the lower divisions with Blackpool and Notts County but it is the enormous success he has had with it at Bolton that has persuaded many Premiership clubs to follow suit.

Allardyce believes it is the way forward for football in this country and recently dismissed 4-4-2, and those who believe in it, as "antiquated".

He said: "It's the way I have played for the last five years or so and which more and more people are playing now.

"I used it sporadically at Notts County and Blackpool before using it here.

"Alex Ferguson has played the same way and he obviously appears to like it because he has continued with it.

"It is used by a number of Premiership clubs now like Crystal Palace, Chelsea, Portsmouth , Manchester United, Everton and Liverpool.

"We find more and more teams are playing exactly the way we play which nullifies the advantage we had before and we have to learn to cope with that."