At Manchester United the talk may be of billionaire American predators, but down at Charlton Athletic the Malcolm Glazers of this world have never been a problem, and they are more concerned with another sort of pest: moths. Cracks about the chairman’s wallet are not welcome. As befits a club founded 100 years ago for urchins living in squalor by the Thames, value for money is Charlton’s credo, and their one and only training pitch sees more traffic than Piccadilly Circus.
On Friday, as the first-team squad trudged off to the showers, they were immediately replaced, like timeshare cabbies, by the under-18s, who had a match against Chelsea. Outside in the rain, the visitors’ coach blocked in everybody in a car park on the cramped side of compact. Inside, in a “temporary” portable building that may pre-date the ark, Alan Curbishley marvelled at the fact that he was in his 14th season as manager, and reflected on the gulf between the fabulously wealthy elite and the make-do-and-mend majority in the Premiership, which is his domain.
As a priority, he would like to see the club’s Sparrows Lane training ground brought into the 21st century, but moves towards modernisation have been held up in circumstances which would be laughable elsewhere. “We have an inflatable indoor facility for the academy youngsters, like they’ve got at Tottenham, but here the local residents say it’s ugly, and will only let us put it up at night,” said Curbishley, with a suitably wry grin.
The aesthetes of New Eltham were not his only problem. “We want to do a bit of building work, to update the place, but someone found a moths’ nest, and the conservationists say we can’t move it.” You can just imagine it holding up United’s state-of-the-art Carrington complex, or Arsenal’s pride and joy, at London Colney. Come on, of course you can. These are lovely, typical tales of a smashing club one would have called homely, before the world went PC mad and such a description became “patronising”.
In terms of what can still be achieved on a pauper’s budget, Charlton are a shining example to every wannabe in the lower divisions. Promoted as champions of the old First Division in millennium year, they have somehow found the money to refurbish what was an old, dilapidated stadium, and have still managed to compete successfully in the Premiership, where they finished a highly creditable seventh last season, ahead of many bigger, richer rivals.
The architect of all this has been Curbishley, whose astute manipulation of the transfer market paid for new stands at The Valley, and much else besides. The man’s mastery of the alchemist’s art is such that it remains one of life’s mysteries how he has had just one offer of alternative employment (from West Ham) since 1991. There are those, inside the Football Association and beyond, who view him as a potential England manager, but in order to fulfil that particular ambition he needs a bigger platform than Charlton, and he is beginning to wonder if he will ever get it. For the time being, what he calls a “topsy-turvy” start to the season is all that is on his mind. A new-look team are winning impressively at home but losing badly away, which, strangely, is the opposite of last year.
Curbishley puts this inconsistency down to the changes he had to make when six important players left, and were replaced later than he would have wished. Two of his best defenders, Richard Rufus and Gary Rowett, were forced into premature retirement by injuries, Scott Parker decamped to Chelsea, and the midfield was further weakened by Claus Jensen joining Fulham. Then Paolo Di Canio left for Lazio, and Carlton Cole, who was on loan from Chelsea last season, decided not to stay and moved on to Aston Villa instead. “Players left at bad times,” Curbishley said. “Di Canio went two weeks before the season started, and Cole, who we thought we had, suddenly went elsewhere.” He signed three high-profile replacements: Denmark’s flying winger, Dennis Rommedahl, from PSV Eindhoven, for £2m, midfielder Danny Murphy, from Liverpool, for £2.5m, and Francis Jeffers, the Arsenal striker, for £2.6m.
“The problem was that Rommedahl reported back two weeks after everyone else, because of Euro 2004, and Murphy and Jeffers only arrived a week before the season got under way, so we never really gelled early enough,” he said. “We know we’ve not been playing as well as we can, and the breaks for international matches haven’t helped. I hope things will settle down now.”
Much more was expected of all the newcomers: “Rommedahl didn’t come to China with us for the pre-season warm-up, and when we came back he went straight into the matches when he didn’t even know who he was playing with. Elsewhere, if Matt Holland comes back from injury this weekend (against Newcastle this afternoon), then Danny Murphy will have played with four different partners in the middle of the park in eight games. The two strikers, Shaun Bartlett and Franny Jeffers, haven’t played together yet. I’m positive, absolutely convinced, that when everybody is available it will all click into place and everybody will be happy with one another.”
At the moment there were those, Jeffers among them, who were less than chuffed. “I think Franny is angry about what has happened to him over the last three years,” Curbishley said of the 23-year-old. Jeffers scored on his England debut in February 2003, but his big move to Arsenal had not worked out, and the player Arsène Wenger thought would be his “Fox in the Box” rejoined Everton on loan last season before committing to Charlton. “Franny had a similar experience to Scott Parker at Chelsea,” Curbishley explained. “He went to Arsenal, where they have a big squad, and he had (Thierry Henry to contend with. They play (Dennis Bergkamp off him, and they also had (Nwankwo Kanu and (Sylvain Wiltord. He couldn’t dislodge them, so he had a frustrating time. On paper, going back to Everton looked great, but it didn’t work out. It ’s like people talking about Parker coming back here — that looks like a good idea, but it might not work. Going back to your old club doesn’t often come off. So Franny came to us desperate to play every week and make up for lost time, and became frustrated again when it didn’t immediately work out that way. But I’m confident that he’ll get goals for us. It’s less than two years ago that he was playing for England (Jeffers ’s one cap to date came against Australia, and that thought gets to him. He has seen others overtake him there; it’s not happening for him, and he’s not happy at the moment. He needs to relax a bit.”
The opposite was probably true of Murphy, whose condition was a cause for concern on his arrival from Anfield. “Danny is a good player, but he hasn’t showed that yet,” Curbishley said. “I don’t think he was really fit when he got here, because he didn’t play that many games for Liverpool last season. I threw him in at the deep end and he struggled, but I’ve spoken to him this week, and it’s the best he’s looked and says it’s the best he’s felt. We bought Rommedahl and Murphy to make a difference, and there’s a lot of pressure on them. We need them to produce, and I’m sure they will.”
Some would say that there was pressure on Curbishley, too, after his outlay on Jeffers, Murphy, Rommedahl and Talal el Karkouri (£1m from Paris St Germain), but the man himself points out that Charlton banked £10m from the sale of Parker and received another £1.25m for Jensen, plus a £1m cut from Jermain Defoe’s transfer from West Ham to Tottenham. As usual, he has done more than balance the books. “Somebody told me the other day that my nett expenditure on players in nearly 14 years is £10m,” he said. “Some managers do that in one summer. My understanding is that there will be more money for players come the January transfer window. It’s not going to be a fantastic amount, but remember we did try to buy Darren Bent, from Ipswich, so that money is still there.”
More than once this season, notably after the 4-0 defeat at Arsenal a fortnight ago, he had been moved to spell out the economic realities of life for a club such as Charlton. Returning to a familiar subject, he said: “The top five clubs add to their squads every summer, we just replace those who leave. As I see it, there’s that five who are bigger and better than the rest. After them there’s Middlesbrough, whose chairman (Steve Gibson gives his managers tremendous spending power, and Tottenham, who have invested an awful lot of money in players over the past two or three seasons. That’s seven. Birmingham’s expenditure in the summer makes that eight. Add Aston Villa to the equation and there’s not too much room in that top 10.” The implication was that Charlton would be hard pressed to repeat seventh place. “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Curbishley agreed.
“Seventh last season was a fantastic achievement because we were fourth from bottom in terms of attendances (with an average of 26,278) and in the bottom six for wages. Those figures are a handicap, but every year we seem to do better than we should. Last season typified that.” To the suggestion that eventually he would tire of the unequal struggle, and that it would dawn on him that he had taken Charlton as far as they could go, he said: “I’ve had the conversation about moving on loads of times, but to do it you’ve got to be offered something else. There’s always speculation about me every time a good job comes up, but nothing materialises. Perhaps other clubs think I’m nice and cosy and never going to leave. I’m 47 next month, and I must admit that 14 years ago I never expected to be still here now. There is a danger that you become part of the furniture. I’ve been here a long, long time, and the fans might get fed up with me. I have an expectation level for Charlton that is realistic, some of them haven’t and one day they might tell me it’s time to go, or I might get a tap on the shoulder from the chairman.
He confirmed that Newcastle’s visit today was a big one for his club. “Our last game was Arsenal, and it passed a lot of us by,” said Curbishley. “Sometimes you go to Highbury and get totally intimidated, and we were that day. We didn’t play. It was a very disappointing performance and we wanted to bounce straight back, but we’ve had to wait two weeks.
“I’ve got good memories of Newcastle. I scored my first goal against them, for West Ham, when I was 17, and my first game as a manager was against them. We won 2-1. So I always look forward to this fixture.”
With that he was off into the downpour to watch the youth team game. Jose Mourinho was not present, but then Chelsea, unlike Charlton, don’t have to nurture their own Defoes and Parkers. And the fly-by-nights they are worried about are not moths.
