Outsider Looking In: Curbs waits for the proving ground

Doubting Charlton fans now know what they have lost - a manager who will rise again

Having been given two season tickets for the directors' box at The Valley, it would be perfectly understandable if at a particularly tense moment Alan Curbishley suddenly took a familiar route down to the technical area to insist on a substitution or tactical change. He was, after all, in charge of Charlton Athletic for 729 competitive matches, the last of them at Manchester United in May, when every visiting supporter present held up a placard reading simply: "Thanks, Curbs".

There was much to thank him for in that most romantic of modern football tales, during which the club not only returned home from exile at two other London grounds but flourished sufficiently to earn six successive seasons under Curbishley in the Premiership, averaging 11th position.

"It's never going to happen again, a medium-sized club having the same manager for 15 years," he said last week of a period of stewardship remarkable for much more than its longevity. One of the many ironies is that it might never have happened at all had Charlton not been in such an impoverished state when they needed a successor to Lennie Lawrence in the summer of 1991.

Curbishley happened to be in situ as Lawrence's assistant, though the board were not sufficiently convinced to offer him the job. Instead, they decided that with Steve Gritt also on the staff they could have two joint player-managers without employing anyone else. The arrangement lasted four seasons, during which the club returned to The Valley and began to stabilise, but soon after taking over as chairman, Richard Murray decided a change was required and that Gritt was the one to be sacrificed.

Unfortunately, he was the more popular of the two with supporters, whom Curbishley found booing the team after only his second match in sole charge. "I think it's true to say that there were some Charlton supporters who didn't like the idea of my taking over," he writes in his book* published last week.

The dissidents were able to repent at leisure over the next 11 years, in which Charlton rose from the middle of what is now the Championship to an equivalent position in the Premiership, average gates increasing from 10,000 to 26,000 and turnover from £2.7m to £40.7m. But for an inexplicable falling away at the end of almost every season, European football would have been achieved for the first time in the club's history.

Whether from lack of depth in the squad, exhaustion or mental weakness, it never happened. The patience of some of the newer supporters, who did not remember the Portakabin days at The Valley or crowds of 4,000 at Selhurst Park, proved to be thin; hearing one rant on a radio phone-in after a particularly uninspiring performance, Curbishley's older brother Bill - the manager of The Who - pulled over in his car and rang the station to put the opposing view.

His younger sibling always insisted that he would know when it was time to go, and the first sign was last February, when "I didn't feel as elated as I should have done" after a 2-0 home victory over the European champions, Liverpool.

"For the first time I started to question the length of time I'd been at the club". The other complication was being invited to a preliminary interview for the vacant England job, and finding a photograph of the occasion splashed across a tabloid newspaper's front page on the morning of a match, above a report that stated he was "set to be crowned England's new manager".

"I was disappointed the way the thing fizzled out a bit," he now says of the Football Association's recruiting technique. "I was very enthusiastic when I came out of the first meeting and very confident, but by the time of the second interviews I missed one because the club wouldn't let me go, which I didn't have a problem with, as we had an FA Cup quarter-final. The [other] second interviews were con-ducted in a luxurious Oxford mansion, and I imagine a spacious interview room where everybody had a chance to present their ideas, and I ended up in a bit of a cloak-and-dagger, glass-sided room at the FA with the cleaners banging on the window."

Not that this surreal experience has put him off the idea of international management. What he must know is that he has to prove himself at a bigger club, with higher-profile players and in European competition. His carefully worded assessment is: "I need to get back in the game and show people that I can do it somewhere else. Then I might be seen differently. In some respects, what I achieved at Charlton was a unique situation. Perhaps it was counter-productive in the end, because people were saying, 'He's not done this and not done that'. We'll have to see if that changes in the future."

A six-month sabbatical seemed a good idea, though it meant missing out this summer on any possibility of exactly the sort of job he needed, at Aston Villa, Middlesbrough or Newcastle. Unless the latter pair suddenly hit a prolonged bad patch, it is difficult to see where a sufficiently attractive Premiership vacancy is going to materialise in the short term. Perhaps the FA might have the solution after all, if they are serious about appointing a full-time Under-21 manager.

"I've got a very open mind," Curbishley says. "I'm not that flash that I'm going to say in October, 'I'm here, throw a job at me'. I'm prepared to move. The children are now 21 and 18, it's not like my kids would be the only Cockneys in the school.

"I just felt that when it did end, I needed a break. I wasn't about to jump into a job a month after I left. I was sounded out on a couple of occasions but declined, and I've stuck to my guns, bec-ause I wanted to have that break. If having six months off backfires on me, then it backfires, but I've made that decision."

When Charlton met United again last Wednesday, he was a guest of Sky Sports, ruefully watching what must now be described as his former club slipping to the bottom of the nascent Premiership table. Any doubting Charlton supporters may soon appreciate just what they have lost.

*Valley Of Dreams (HarperSport, £17.99)