The clubs have agreed an undisclosed fee for the England international and with Dyer keen to move south to be closer to his family, the Hammers - who have signed Scott Parker, Julien Faubert, Craig Bellamy, Richard Wright and Freddie Ljungberg so far this summer - are now firm favourites to land the midfielder.

And Allardyce, who is already eager to add experience - and numbers - to his squad has confirmed he will act briskly to replace the 28-year-old.

He said: ``My job now is to replace him, which shouldn't take too long I don't think, and then move on to other players in other positions as quickly as I can or at the same time.

``I think we'll be close by the end of the week to maybe one or two players, I would hope.

``Then after that I would look to get at least another two or maybe three in because if Kieron goes, whoever comes in to replace him, that's only one for one, so it's not actually improving the squad in terms of strength in depth.

``There's still three or four players need to be got on top of whoever we replace Kieron with.''

The former Bolton boss also admitted that the proposed deal for Dyer was one all parties could be content with.

``We've agreed a deal so you'd have thought that he will finish up where he needs to finish up to solve his family problems.

``From our point of view and from his point of view it's a satisfactory result. There was a need to do it as quickly as we possibly could and we've worked all out to do that and we've finally resolved the situation.''

Meanwhile, Allardyce has also set his sights on putting an end to the fitness problems that have hampered the club in recent years - through hard work.

Allardyce was unable to put as many top names out in a friendly defeat to Hull last night as he would have liked due to injury and he wants an end to such difficulties.

"We couldn't, unfortunately, bring the team down that we wanted to (to Hull) because of all these niggly problems that we've got.

"And obviously at this stage of the season we're very disappointed with the number of problems that we've got. It appears the players' tolerance levels are still very, very low and obviously I warned everybody about that before I came.

"I felt that they were deconditioned to a point and it's been proven so. We've been trying to train them on double shifts. Take them on double shifts in terms of two sessions a day and they haven't been able to tolerate it. I'd like to have brought a full-strength side to play 90 minutes here and a full-strength side to play 90 minutes on Sunday, unfortunately I'm not going to get that."