James Lawton: Amid the fantasy stands Curbishley making a clarion call to realism

It was all so simple at the start of the Premiership. Simple as a gold-rush. You made your stake and you let the devil take care of those who didn't. Now, a decade on, a certain reality has kicked in.

Look at the boom league and what do you see? Three clubs in their own well-heeled world; two, Newcastle United and Liverpool, desperately trying to hit the optimum levels which might earn them the last available place in the Champions' League; and then there are the other 15. What is their distinguishing mark? It is that they have one foot in football heaven, one in hell. Amazingly, none of them can preen themselves on the idea that they are safe from the possibility of a fall. You might say it makes for an exciting season, but then you don't have to live it. You don't have to play the football version of Russian roulette.

It was supposed to be so many positive things, this new super league. It wasn't going to be a gut-wrenching roll of the dice. It was going to trim itself down, become lean and friendly to the cause of England's team preparation. It wasn't going to be flooded with foreign mercenaries to the point where Chelsea would field a team without a single home-bred player. It certainly wasn't going to be decided by Russian money and, maybe, Irish horse traders.

Back then it was supposed to be reaching out rather than grasping down.

Now in this great swathe of brinkmanship some are entitled to feel more bullish than others. Sam Allardyce, of Bolton Wanderers, is full of himself at the moment and it is with some reason after the defeats of Chelsea and Liverpool and a moral victory over Arsenal last weekend. But after yesterday's 3-1 revenge performance by ailing Liverpool at Anfield, you have to wonder how secure is Allardyce's new reputation as the League's leading Houdini? When his playmaker, Jay-Jay Okocha, soon disappears into the distant maw of the African Nations Cup - for six weeks, which in this season of all seasons could seem like half a lifetime - Bolton's reserves of will and talent will surely be severely tested.

Gordon Strachan of Southampton, Chris Coleman of Fulham, Steve Bruce of Birmingham and Alan Curbishley of Charlton have already touched the apex of realistic ambition - the fourth place which Arsenal's Arsène Wenger declared several years ago was now a more important achievement than winning the FA Cup.

Last week the complexion of David O'Leary's brief reign at Aston Villa changed dramatically in a week - two League wins and a Carling Cup success over Chelsea inspired him to talk light-headedly of a hero's return to Leeds yesterday.

O'Leary would have been better advised to keep his own counsel. No other manager will ever provide more dramatic evidence of the Premiership's capacity to break a club, to draw it on to the anvil of ambition and then pound it to within an ace of its life. The lunacy of Leeds was extreme, of course, and for a more sober guide to the pitfalls of fighting to compete seriously in the top flight we perhaps have to consider the plight of clubs like Coventry City, Derby County, Sheffield Wednesday and Wimbledon. They all stretched themselves to the limits before coming to see survival in lower divisions as an end in itself.

Leicester City stepped off the road to perdition with a move into administration that gave them renewed life in the Premiership, but in the process closed off the dubious loophole, their kind of manoeuvre now costing any new perpetrator the docking of 10 points. Portsmouth rushed to the top of the League; now they are sinking back into reality.

So where do you look for the greatest achievement in the Premiership? The brief record is filled with Manchester United, challenged only by the grace and vision of Wenger's extraordinary football instincts. But supreme, indeed untouchable, in a special category is Charlton's Curbishley.

In the flux of this season, when big names like Graeme Souness and Steve McClaren and Kevin Keegan wrestle for those few points which have teams shuttling up and down the League, Curbishley's achievement is all the more startling. It is nothing to do with that brief occupancy of fourth place, a dizzy height which is still within easy touching distance for Charlton, but the overwhelming sense that no one has understood more completely the challenge presented by the Premiership to all but the ruling élite.

Charlton's Premiership life came and went and then returned, and at no stage did Curbishley relax his hold on what it took, first to hang on and then to prosper. He certainly didn't take the O'Leary route. He didn't demand a fantasy chequebook. He didn't want to run before his club could walk with any degree of security. He hasn't even called the odds in the jaunty style of the high-achieving Alldardyce.

It has made him an unassailable point of sanity in an increasingly frenetic world, and if it should happen that the old allure of Tottenham proves persuasive, if he is tempted away from the empire he has built so resolutely, the question will not be whether Curbishley is big enough for Spurs but whether one of the most famous clubs in England is big enough, and wise enough, for him.

That is a question Curbishley will no doubt explore with some care. If it should happen, his admirers can afford to be relaxed about the process. Right now, illusion is rife in the Premiership. Except at The Valley, where they have been taught that it comes with life-threatening risk.