Martin Allen: 'If I earned £5m a year, I'd make sure I knew Brentford'

Mad Dog's reputation for forthright opinion still leaves its mark. Nick Townsend hears his thoughts on Sven, Sunderland and life

Perhaps it should not totally astonish us that the happenings of Brentford Football Club tend not to cause a beep on Sven Goran Eriksson's radar. Still, Martin Allen decided that an invitation to drop in was appropriate when the pair met before Christmas.

"I was lucky enough to attend the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year," recalls the Bees' manager. "I won the award for London Sports Personality." He pauses before adding with a satisfied smile: "I beat Jose Mourinho. Anyway, during the evening I asked Mr Eriksson if he'd like to pop down to Brentford one morning, watch us train and have a chat.

"Well, he didn't even know who Brentford were. 'Who's Brentford; where are you? What division are you in?' he asked me. I replied, 'Thank you very much; goodbye', and walked away. It was at that point I wondered what it would be like to go into a 50-50 tackle with him."

That recollection had been the response to an original question relating to last weekend's newspaper sting. But you under-stood the assertion. "God bless, I hope England do win the World Cup," adds Allen, who, in marked contrast to the Swede, walks an emotional tightrope during games, and without a safety net either. "It would make me so happy. But when he didn't know Brentford... I must admit I wasn't too happy. If I earned £5 million a year, I'd make sure I knew every club from Devon to Newcastle, every player, coach, manager, referee..."

Allen, whose name became a byword for forthright, occasionally blood-curdling commitment in a midfield career which embraced QPR, West Ham and Portsmouth, and a character whom nobody would relish confronting even if the challenge was 70-30 in their favour, is determined that Eriksson can have no excuse for not being fully aware of his team by Saturday night.

A home fourth-round FA Cup tie between his First Division promotion-chasing team against Premiership-but-doomed Sunderland is a sumptuous prospect, and one the Black Cats will regard as decidedly unappealing should Allen manage to let slip the Mad Dogs of war - if he will forgive a reference to that epithet which so irritated him as a player.

"Doesn't apply to this game," he says, rejecting the notion. "A lot of Sunderland players were brought in from lower-League clubs and they know what it's like coming to play here. We'd have a better chance of beating Chelsea. In fact, we would, in my opinion, have definitely beaten Chelsea. Those players would have had a short, sharp shock. Sunderland's players, God bless 'em, know what to expect."

He adds: "It's great for me to be in the dug-out next to Mick McCarthy, a bloke who's managed in the World Cup. I'm full of admiration for him. But of course, we've got a chance with a sell-out crowd backing us."

The last observation is about as predictable as he ever gets, this dedicated if somewhat eccentric 41-year-old, who plunged into the freezing waters of the Tees before Brentford's FA Cup fourth-round victory at Hartlepool last season, and then took a dip in the Solent ahead of the fifth-round game against Southampton. He insists such acts are spontaneous, not publicity stunts. "I never do it just to be silly," he says. "There will always be something hidden that you can get across to the players; meanings in life, meanings in professional performance."

Indeed, he bridles at the suggestion that he is a "personality manager", as he was labelled last week when it was reported in one newspaper that Greg Dyke, appointed as non-executive chairman of the club by the new owners, the supporters' trust Bees United, on Friday, would bring "extra publicity".

He relates what occurred an hour and a half before that Southampton match. "I knocked on Harry Redknapp's door, just to say hello," he recalls. "In there were Jim Smith, Kevin Bond, Dennis Rofe and Dave Pleat, all sat watching a game on the TV. One of them said, 'So, have you been diving in the Solent this morning, Martin?' And they all laughed. Once the laughter had stopped, I looked every one of them in the eye, and said, 'Yeah, I swam in the Solent, and now, this afternoon, we are going to beat you'. I never laughed, I never smiled. I just left and slammed the door. As I went back to our dressing room, I thought, 'We're going to win'. Why? I just knew it. Sometimes people underestimate you." He wasn't far wrong, either. His side drew 2-2, and might have triumphed, before losing 3-1 in the replay.

This season, as last - when Brentford ultimately just missed out - the priority is promotion. It is his all-consuming ambition. "If I left Brentford, it would have to be for something which would allow me to stand in front of all my players and justify why, and have all the supporters say to me, 'Good on you, off you go'. Until that time, I'll stay. Yeah, I'd like the chance one day, but first I'll do my work here."

Though he claims to be "much calmer now", Allen, who has apparently graduated from the Stuart Pearce College of Touchline Etiquette, remains driven. He attributes it to insecurity brought about by a dread of failure. "When you're younger, you've got that beautiful tree at the bottom of the garden," he explains. "You go out and pick the gold coins every month to pay for the holiday, the car, look after the children, pay the mort-gage. But one day that tree gets cut down and you've got to find that money, and there aren't too many opportunities. Footballers who have retired are generally not qualified or skilled enough to go straight into another job. Quite quickly a lot of doors close and a lot of footballers have a lot of problems: depression, alcohol, stress on their marriages. I went through all that - well, not the alcohol side - but I went through a marriage breakdown."

He adds: "I woke up one morning with nothing; I had gone though a costly divorce and I was on my own in a flat; I didn't even have my children around me. No money, no career. I went out collecting leaves in people's gardens for £10 an hour because I had nothing else to do. So, when I was offered the chance to go to Reading as first-team coach, can you imagine how much I wanted us to win? I feel much more secure now, much more confident in myself, much more stable in my life. But what I went through will always be there."

It is fair to say that his reputation as a player probably preceded him. Although he is fiercely supportive of his men, you cannot imagine too many of them defying him. Only one character at the club's Osterley training ground gets away with ignoring his master's voice - his black labrador puppy, Monty.

A member of the great Allen footballing dynasty - Martin is the son of Dennis, a popular inside-forward at Reading in the Sixties, who became a top-level English FA coach - he displayed evidence from an early age that he would make his mark, both figuratively and physically.

"I didn't mean to go out and injure people and kick people," he maintains. "It came out of an intense desire to do well. I used to go home from games and be in bed by seven o'clock, exhausted. I'd sleep right through to the next day. I was very deman-ding of myself and my family."

Harry Hindsight - one of his favourite expressions - would not alter that approach. "No, I don't regret those things. I was like it from 10 years old," he says. "That was the first time I told a supporter to fuck off. It was the mother of one of the other children in an Under-11 match just outside Reading. She was having a go at me because I'd kicked her son. At the end of the game, I was half-expecting a clip round the ear, but my dad said: 'If that's how you felt, you've got to do whatever you can to be the best'. My dad always taught me that you have to stand up for yourself."

Allen always regretted that his father, who died in 1995, never saw him work at Reading, where he arrived in 2000, having been summoned by Alan Pardew. Then he assisted Peter Shreeves at Barnet, taking charge when the former Spurs manager left, before being appointed by Brentford nearly two years ago.

"I'm happier now than I've ever been," he says. "I earn crap money, but I've got a fantastic job. When I played, I earned decent money, but that's never been the main stimulant in my life. Of course I'm ambitious, but why go and work somewhere and get paid pot-loads of money and be unhappy and fed up?"

Martin Allen may never be judged Cruft's "best of breed". But one thing is for sure. He is nobody's lapdog.

LIFE & TIMES

NAME: Martin Allen.

BORN: 18 August 1965, Reading.

VITAL STATISTICS: 5ft 10in, 11st.

POSITION: Midfielder.

NICKNAME: Mad Dog.

PLAYING CAREER: Queen's Park Rangers 1983-89, 165 games, 19 goals; West Ham (£675,000 fee) '89-96, 232, 34; Portsmouth (loan) '95, 15, 3; (£500,000) '96-99, 31, 1; Southend (loan) '97, 6. Total: 449 games, 57 goals.

MANAGERIAL CAREER: Barnet 2002-04 (initially as caretaker); Brentford, March '04-current, League One play-off semi-final '05: won 45, lost 28, drawn 28.

FOOTBALL FAMILY: Cousins Paul, Bradley and Clive Allen, father Denis and uncle Les were all professional players.