THESE ARE HEADY DAYS FOR Charlton Athletic. After a busy summer in the transfer market, Alan Curbishley, the manager, is considering more purchases. “You’ve got to make sure you can cover every angle,” he said. And really, did anyone ever expect to hear him talking in such grand terms? That is what a seventh-place finish does for you.
Not so long ago, a signing such as Francis Jeffers would have been been paraded with gusto and thrown into action. But Curbishley has limited his appearances to 20 minutes against Bolton Wanderers and 12 at home on Saturday. Jeffers is desperate to play but given his rather sorry tale of failing to match the hype at Arsenal, Curbishley is wrapping him, if not in cotton wool, then at least in bubble wrap.
“I want to give him the best possible platform,” Curbishley said. “The last thing I want to do is throw him in before he knows the players’ names and for it not to happen.” In his short stint on the field, Jeffers looked sprightly and put one eager shot just over the crossbar, but his new manager wants to protect him from those who might snipe that Jeffers cannot any longer produce the goods.
Harry Redknapp, the Portsmouth manager, does not have any cotton wool and if he did, he would not have the option to use it. He was aching to bring on a striker to trouble Charlton but simply lacked the means. “When I needed a front man, I had no one,” he said. Had Ricardo Fuller’s work permit come through in time, Redknapp would have thrown him on regardless of how many names the former Preston North End striker had learnt in one morning at the club.
There are no players waiting in the wings either. “I’m not at West Ham (any more) — I haven’t got Defoe or Lampard or Ferdinand or Carrick.” It all sounded a bit depressing, especially when Redknapp said that in place of a glass of claret to help him through the highlights of the match, he would instead have “a large glass of arsenic”.
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Portsmouth fans would sympathise. They lost courtesy of a freak, late goal, Shaka Hislop fumbling and then losing the ball as it spun off the head of David Unsworth. Redknapp, and probably a large number in the crowd, missed the ball trickling over the line as Hislop appeared to have it in his grasp and they would have been looking to see where, upfield, he might release it. The ugliness of the deed was accentuated as Patrick Berger, had, earlier in the second half, equalised — Charlton having taken the lead through Jason Euell’s prodded finish — with the sort of looping volley that sets mouths drooling in delight.
So while Redknapp spends this coming week shopping in a hurried, worried manner of someone with an empty fridge and people coming over for dinner, Curbishley will be browsing with a studied air, able to resist the overtures of pushy salesmen. But although we are all used by now to Redknapp’s tales of woe, Curbishley needs a new vocabulary. He has to placate players who are keen to play but who will have to bide their time. At half-time, he had to tell Dennis Rommedahl, the Denmark international signed from PSV Eindhoven, to stop thinking he could play “like a free spirit”.
Curbishley is juggling, Redknapp’s hands are empty — “at the moment we are not as strong as we were last season” — but Redknapp is getting by because “playing in the Premier League is the best thing in the world”.