Brooking harbours steel behind the benign smile

Gary Lineker at Leicester City, Trevor Brooking at West Ham United. What next, Alan Hansen forsaking the golf courses and returning to Partick Thistle?

Brooking, 54, was yesterday confirmed as caretaker manager of the club he played for across three decades and immediately insisted that, with three games left, they would not slip out of the Premiership "with a whimper".

Such talk is not readily associated with Brooking, a West Ham director and BBC football pundit, who has already been dismissed as too nice a guy and too courteous, to succeed as a football manager. Where Hansen is quick to take sides in front of the TV cameras, Brooking is renowned for his capacity to sit benignly on the fence.

Yesterday he leapt off with both feet. He will select the team for the games against Manchester City, managed by his former England team-mate Kevin Keegan, Chelsea and Birmingham City, which will shape West Ham's future. "It has been a difficult few days and you could say 'well it is not going to happen' – and you could use it as a weak way of going out with a whimper," Brooking said yesterday at the club's Chadwell Heath training ground.

Interestingly, he is thought to have put himself forward to stand in for Glenn Roeder after the manager was taken ill following Monday's dramatic victory against Middlesbrough. Roeder, 47, has been diagnosed as suffering from a blocked blood vessel in the brain and is still undergoing tests at the Royal London Hospital.

It is a slightly surreal appointment and, perhaps, an indication that Roeder's staff, headed by the first-team coach Paul Goddard and the reserve-team manager Roger Cross, are not deemed strong enough to be left in charge. But Brooking has previously shown little inclination towards management – not that his tenure now will last any more than three weeks – and the closest he has come before is coaching children on Hackney Marshes. He quit doing that because, he said, he found the parents too demanding.

And yet there are signs that he has been frustrated. His involvement with West Ham – the club he joined as an apprentice in 1965 – has grown. He has been seen in the dressing room occasionally over the past two years since he returned as a non-executive director. And he gave an interview to a West Ham website in which he hinted that there were regrets at not going into management and that it had been a possibility following the sacking at Upton Park of Lou Macari.

There may well, also, be more to Brooking than simply acting as a steady hand. His level-headedness is legendary – born in Barking, east London, the son of a policeman, he chose Shenfield when he moved because it was within range of West Ham's training ground and he still lives there. But, those who dealt with Brooking during his three-year stint as chairman of Sport England say there is steel behind the smile.

Last year Brooking tore into the Sports Minister, Richard Caborn, with what has been described as "controlled anger" over the Government's lack of funding for sport. It is thought that the attack and other outspoken comments may have cost him a knighthood, the honour bestowed on his predecessors.

But it was also a sign that Brooking can be his own man. Indeed, during his playing days – 636 games for West Ham during which he won two FA Cups – he became, at 22, managing director of Colbrook Plastics, a small company making loose-leaf binders. He continued to run the company throughout his career and afterwards.

It gave him a head for business which he took with him into the Sport England job and, although he was, probably rightly, fiercely criticised for the Wembley fiasco, most observers agree that he carried off the post with aplomb. "He could be very caustic in private," one said. "Extremely persuasive and not like the guy who sits on the fence you see on television."

Another former West Ham player, Tony Cottee, welcomed the appointment. "It's a positive move by the board. Appointing Trevor is a very good step for the club. He's a figurehead here and is well-respected by the fans." And, if, by some chance, he does carry it off there will be plenty of lobbying from E13 for that knighthood after all.