ONCE, AFTER A VICTORY, MARTIN Allen compared himself to the little boy who walked to school bathed in thermal Ready Brek glow, but even after this defeat he was emanating radiance. The Brentford manager’s spark for an idea precedes his time at Barnet, where he charged fans to travel on the team bus to pay for the players’ lunch and, three years on, he concocted a similar ploy to raise money to pay for an hotel before the FA Cup fifth-round tie away to Charlton Athletic.

When Brentford travelled to The Valley on Friday, the team bus pulled into a shabby hotel where Adrian Whitbread, Allen’s assistant, disappeared, apparently to confirm their booking. On the coach, Allen told the players that the club did not have the money to stay in more than three-star accommodation. “It looked like something out of Prisoner: Cell Block H,” Allen said. “The players just looked at it and said , ‘Are we really staying there?’ I told them that we couldn’t afford to stay in a posh hotel.”

But, after unloading their kit and looking around Charlton’s stadium, they drove to a five-star establishment in Canary Wharf. “The players’ faces were priceless,” Allen said. “I wanted to treat them because they deserved it. I didn’t want to stay in a poxy hotel for a game like this. My players deserves the best now. We stayed in the business district as I wanted them to do the business.

” The money for the ruse came from a club raffle, the winner of which, Chris Swatton, was given a place alongside Allen in the dugout for the match. Swatton trained with the players, stayed in the hotel, travelled on the team bus and listened to the team talk before the match.

Allen promised Swatton, who bought a £50 ticket, that he could bark out the orders from the technical area at one stage during the match. “No sooner had he gone out in the second half than they scored their third goal,” Allen said. “So I told him: ‘Get lost.’ It was great for him. That is what the club is about.”

They still collect money in buckets at Brentford, where Allen’s resourcefulness is priceless in helping the club to tackle a debt of £6 million and losses of £600,000 a year. D. J. Campbell’s transfer three weeks ago brought in an initial £500,000 but has also left a hole, notwithstanding that they had scored eight goals in three league matches since he left for Birmingham City. Without the forward’ s mischievous fleetness — and with the busy Isaiah Rankin oddly on the substitutes’ bench on Saturday — Brentford’s attack was deprived of the vibrancy and aggression to unsettle a Premiership defence. “If we’d not sold him, we might not have a club,” Allen said. “It’s a football club, not a D. J. Campbell club.”

Rankin’s swivel, which made it 3-1, and, later, Sam Sodje’s header on to the post, were little more than keepsakes of an infectious Cup run that included the scalp of Sunderland in the last round. “Had it (Sodje’s header) gone in, we would have won the game and then we were two games from a place in Europe, which was achievable,” Allen said.

That vision belongs to his counterpart Alan Curbishley, who after infamous defeats to lower-league teams in the competition in recent seasons, is contemplating their third quarter-final in 12 years. “We can look at Millwall and Southampton playing a big boy in the final and getting to Europe,” Curbishley said. “My wife, who does not get involved, will have to go the final if we get there.”

Strikes from Darren Bent and Jay Bothroyd at either end of the first half damped any suspicion of an upset and ensured that Charlton could be professional without being inspiring. “The timely goals managed to knock the stuffing out of them,” Curbishley said.

With Brentford chasing the game, Bent and Shaun Bartlett combined to feed the impressive Bryan Hughes, who slotted the ball under Stuart Nelson for his fifteenth goal in 26 FA Cup starts. Hughes was a peripheral midfield player in his first season at the club, began this campaign on the bench, but has been helped by the sale of Danny Murphy. “Let’s hope that we get a home draw because on our day we can beat anyone here,” Hughes said.

Charlton Athletic (4-4-2): T Myhre — L Young, C Perry, H Hreidarsson, C Powell — R Kishishev (sub: D Ambrose, 75min), A Smertin, B Hughes (sub: M Holland, 82), J Thomas — J Bothroyd (sub: S Bartlett, 62), D Bent. Substitutes not used: S Andersen, J Spector. Booked: Bothroyd, Thomas

Brentford (4-4-2): S Nelson — K O’Connor, S Sodje, M Turner, A Frampton — S Tillen (sub: P Brooker, 46), R Newman (sub: I Rankin, 57), J Tabb, D Pratley — L Owusu, M Gayle (sub: R Peters, 73). Substitutes not used: A Bankole, J Mousinho

Referee: M Riley