Bill Curbishley is only a phone call away

[Brian Cady]

>From the Scotsman: 
http://sport.scotsman.com/football.cfm?id=1873062006 

Hammers in discord must hit a new beat 
JON HOTTEN

WEST Ham are certainly in need of a decent manager by the name of Curbishley. Whether he is Alan or his older brother, Bill, is the pertinent question.

Something in the Curbishley family DNA has made them leaders of men. Alan turned homeless Charlton into Premiership perennials; Bill manages the Who and Led Zeppelin. Alan is acquainted with the grind of running a football club; Bill looked after Keith Moon. Alan had to re-pick teams when players tweaked calves minutes before kick-off; Bill had to salvage a Who tour when John Entwistle dropped dead in a hotel room with two hookers and a pile of cocaine the night before their first gig. Alan spent the kind of money Charlton make; Bill looks after the money that giant bands on tour make - the rough equivalent of a home game every night for a year.

And Alan finds West Ham teetering on the edge of relegation, having been bought out by an Icelandic biscuit baron. An Israeli agent advised them to acquire a couple of Argentines, whom they pay but don't own, and who helped to drive their last manager so crazy that he started a fight with Arsene Wenger. 
These are the kind of exotic problems more familiar to his big brother.

Football clubs and rock bands exist in fragile ecosystems of their own creation. There is rarely cause without effect, whether it's the size of the wages paid to the centre-forward or the size of the backstage sandwiches. Just as one bummer of an album can sink a rock band, one stinker of a season can make a football club implode, and boy, have West Ham conjured up a stinker.

The team have been as skittish as a two-year-old, and new chairman Eggert Magnusson has decided to treat them like one. His assertion that there was a "shocking lack" of motivation followed the conventional wisdom that Alan Pardew had lost the dressing- room. This has become the game's reductio ad absurdum: footballers have finally abrogated all responsibility for themselves, and can perform now only if someone tells them to. Steered and dominated, they desire an easily understood paradigm, the shelter of uncompromising leadership.

It would be all too familiar to men like Bill, managers who became famous for their ability to penetrate this mentality, simultaneously to mollycoddle and bully their charges into doing what they are paid for. The trick is to provide an infantile environment in which parameters are clearly defined.

Alan will be required to do the same for West Ham's lost dressing-room, where the poor lambs have been unsettled by a change in the man who pays their wages and new boys who have taken their places in the team.

Bill once had cause to confront Sharon Osbourne's father, Don Arden, a gun-toting, self-styled Mr Big known for dangling Robert Stigwood over a fifth-floor balcony and putting out a cigar on the forehead of Fleetwood Mac's manager. Bill's phone rang. It was Charlie Kray:

"Ere Bill, have you upset a bloke named Don Arden?".

"I might have mate. What's he saying?"

"He's just asked me to come round and sort you out."

"Right, thanks, Charlie. You give him my address, and tell him to be here in 20 minutes".

For the first time that anyone could remember, Deadly Don Arden was a no-show. Bill spends much of his time in Spain now, another low-key businessman in the millionaires' playground of Puerto Banus. But Icelandic Eggy and the players that rolled over at Bolton last week might do well to remember that for Alan, Bill is only a phone-call away. 

-Brian in Atlanta 
The Who This Month! 
http://www.thewhothismonth.com

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