Authors: Emy Onuora
As his shock turned to disbelief and then happiness at the prospect of gaining an England cap at the age of thirty-one, the media interest in Powell and Charlton became unprecedented. On the journey up to Coventry his phone never stopped ringing as seemingly every journalist and radio station were keen to speak to him, intrigued by his age as a debutant, not to mention the prospect of him becoming the first Charlton player to be capped by England for thirty-six years, making him the biggest surprise of the new manager’s first squad.
The FA contacted him to make all the necessary arrangements and he offered to get a train up to Birmingham, where the team was to play at Villa Park while Wembley was being re-developed. Instead, they informed him, a car would pick him up from his home and drive him to Birmingham. He asked what he was expected to wear and he was told that he could wear what he liked and wasn’t required to bring anything with him except boots and shin pads.
On arrival, he was assigned to a hotel room and when he walked in, his training kit and tracksuits were all laid out in readiness for him. He studiously examined his training kit, amazed it wasn’t the same kind of replica kit that might be available in Sports Direct, but rather authentic training
gear with embroidered badges. The other players made him feel welcome and in Peter Taylor and Sammy Lee he had coaches whom he had worked with at club level. Everyone in and around the squad was encouraging and inclusive and he sought to nullify any signs of an inferiority complex by reminding himself he’d been selected, he belonged and he was there on merit.
Eriksson had selected a bigger squad than was usual and intended to give playing time to as many squad members as possible. The training sessions were sharp and precise and he was greatly impressed by the quality of the players in the squad; Powell performed well and held his own amongst England’s finest footballers.
At the final training session, the squad practised set pieces in preparation for the evening’s game, and as the training bibs were handed out he realised he had the same colour bib as Beckham, Ferdinand and Owen and so it dawned on him that he was in the starting XI to make his England debut against Spain.
On the evening of the game, the most noticeable feature of the pre-match routine was the quietness of the dressing room. Every dressing room at Charlton and at other places was full of noise, but this particular dressing room was deathly quiet. There was no loud music and no rabble rousing; Eriksson spoke quietly and carefully, stressing that this was the start of a new era, that they should be very proud of themselves and that he wished them all good luck. As Eriksson completed his remarks, the silence was punctuated by the usual exhortations of encouragement and the players left the dressing room to line up in the tunnel with their Spanish counterparts. Each player led out a mascot and Powell held the hand of a young girl aged about nine or ten,
spending the long walk from the tunnel to the pitch talking with his mascot. As he went, he remembered all the people who’d helped him get to this point in his career and who had come to Villa Park to watch him make his debut. In the crowd were his mother, his wife, old school teachers and his coaches from Charlton, Palace, Aldershot and Derby.
The game itself went well for England in general and for Powell in particular. He looked extremely comfortable on his debut, playing like an England regular rather than a debutant. In his best moments in the game, he nutmegged Spanish midfielder Pep Guardiola and had a rampaging run down the left to get in a dangerous cross. A tight calf necessitated his substitution as a precaution at half-time, but Eriksson expressed pleasure at his performance and told him he’d done enough to gain inclusion for his next squad, something that gave Powell immense satisfaction: he was determined not to be a one-cap wonder and, as he put it, ‘the subject of a quiz question’.
Powell was to retire at the age of forty after twenty-four years as a professional, a more than decent career. He had amassed over 650 league appearances, gaining five caps for England, and had spent the previous five years as chairman of the PFA. Fitness-wise, he had looked after himself but had begun preparing for retirement. His experience at the PFA provided him with options to go into football administration and he gained considerable experience undertaking media work, but his experience at his last club as a player tipped the balance in favour of a career as a coach.
His last manager was Nigel Pearson at Leicester City in League One, where, at the age of thirty-eight, he’d signed initially for six months in August 2008. When Leicester won
promotion as champions, this was extended till the end of the season, which Powell thought would have been a fitting point to retire. However, Pearson offered him a role as player-coach, impressed with Powell’s habit of taking the full-backs for ten minutes or so at the end of training for an extra session, as well as how he dealt with young players. Pearson offered to keep him registered as a player, wanting Powell to help create the right atmosphere in the dressing room. After cautiously requesting time from Pearson to think about his offer, Powell realised that this was a great way to begin the next chapter in his career and agreed to take the job.
In the following season in the Championship, he played around five games, each of which, in his own words, ‘took me about a month to recover from’. His last game was at Pride Park, where he played the full ninety minutes. Leicester had a great season, eventually missing out on promotion after a semi-final loss, but Pearson moved on to Hull City after falling out with the Foxes’ chairman.
In spite of Pearson’s departure, Powell was asked to stay on when new manager Paulo Sousa was appointed and, after a brief spell as manager, Sousa moved on to be replaced by Sven-Göran Eriksson, who had given Powell his England debut. Eriksson’s management style was very open, valuing the input of all the coaches, and although Powell’s main duties were in coaching the under-21s, Eriksson allowed him the responsibility of taking some first-team training sessions. Learning much within that ideal coaching environment, Powell received an offer from former Palace teammate Alan Pardew to become assistant manager at Newcastle United. After some thought, he rejected the offer, considering himself too inexperienced and not yet ready to take on such a massive job.
Two weeks later, Phil Parkinson was sacked from Powell’s old club, Charlton Athletic, and Powell was offered an interview for the vacant post. If he was going to start anywhere in management, Charlton was a good place to begin his career. He was a former player and Charlton legend and, as a new and inexperienced manager, this status would provide him with a little cushion from the trigger-happy managerial merry-go-round that characterised league appointments. Within a few hours of his interview he was appointed as manager in January 2011, and took time to take stock and assess his squad as the rest of the season petered out unsuccessfully for the club. At the start of the following season, he brought in eight new players and went on to win promotion, with Charlton finishing as League One champions in his first full season as a manager, losing only five games and gaining over 100 points. He also won League One Manager of the Year into the bargain.
The following season, 2012/13, he led Charlton to ninth place in the Championship, only three points from the playoff places, and his successful tenure at Charlton had brought a feel-good factor to the club. Charlton were on a high, with fans, players and everybody associated with the club in an optimistic mood for a successful campaign in a season in which a push for promotion to the Premier League was a realistic goal.
However, the sense of optimism soon gave way to disappointment as Charlton’s owners effectively sabotaged the new campaign. They had informed Powell that they would make between £4 million and £5 million available for new signings in order to support a concerted push for promotion to the Premier League. In the event, they didn’t renew any of the existing players’ contracts and the £4–5 million transfer
budget never materialised, with Powell only able to bring in cheap free transfers. It was going to be a tough season: he knew it, and he warned the fans that the side were likely to struggle.
The club had been sold club to a Belgian consortium, which forced Powell to sell his best players, and brought in inferior replacements, and the club became embroiled in a relegation battle. It was during this season that Powell learned some valuable lessons about the harsh realities of football management. From the perspective of fan forums, radio phone-ins and media pundits, the art of football management is an easy one, confined solely to selecting the right line-up, buying and selling the right players, selecting the most appropriate tactics and making the right substitutions. Powell’s experience as a manager in that difficult, fateful season highlighted the complex nature of modern football management; the responsibilities associated with the role extended far beyond preparing the first team.
The manager acts as the public face of the club and is expected to comment not only on the fortunes of the first team, but also on a range of off-field issues, irrespective of whether or not they fall under his remit. The club’s failure to renew players’ contracts meant that Powell constantly had to deal with enquiries from agents wanting to know about contract negotiations on behalf of their clients. Powell wasn’t in a position to provide the answers to contract questions and had to remind agents of their clients’ need to keep playing well and be professional while they were at the club, even in situations where deals were being negotiated to move to other clubs. There were other problems that were also outside of his control. The drainage system at Charlton’s Valley ground had collapsed and wouldn’t be repaired till the end
of the season, letting water sit on the surface and leaving the pitch in a bad way. Games were cancelled and one was abandoned, leaving the side with a fixture backlog.
The one bright spot, however, was the side’s FA Cup run. They had reached the quarter-finals of the competition, where they would meet Sheffield United, and they could feel confident about progressing to the semi-finals, which would have been rewarded with a Wembley appearance. However, the relationship between Powell and the club’s owners had reached the point where Powell felt that they were looking for the first opportunity to sack him. He told staff that he would likely be sacked if the club lost their FA Cup tie. At this stage of the season, Charlton were fourth from bottom. During the weekend of the FA Cup tie, amazingly, all the other teams around them won, putting Charlton bottom of the league with four games in hand. They lost 2–0 to Sheffield United on the Sunday in the FA Cup and Powell was sacked the following day.
For the next six months, he filled his time by doing radio and other media work and took the opportunity to take his Pro Licence. He was invited to the World Cup but couldn’t go due to his Pro Licence commitments. Instead, he helped coach the England under-17 squad in preparation for the European Championships in Malta, in which they were ultimately victorious. The under-17s’ coach, John Peacock, ran the Pro Licence course and had asked him to come in for three days to coach ahead of the competition.
At the beginning of the 2014/15 season, Powell received a call completely out of the blue with an offer to manage League One’s Huddersfield Town, making him the only black manager in the league until Keith Curle was appointed at Carlisle United a few weeks later.
His brief at Huddersfield was clearly laid out by the club chairman: to overachieve within a fairly tight budget while introducing young players from the club’s academy. In over 600 first-team appearances under a succession of coaches and managers, Powell learned that, as the public face of the club, what a manager says and how he carries himself is of critical importance. At Charlton he felt he had an overall duty to protect the club’s image and therefore had to protect fans from much of the boardroom machinations, whereas at Huddersfield he was able to be far more open with information provided for fans. The squad at Huddersfield was as yet not his own and he was keen to bring in his own signings to better reflect his footballing ideas and philosophy. This would take time, providing that he was given it.
Powell was acutely aware of his position as a role model for aspiring black managers, and for the wider black community. At meetings in the street and in the barbershop, in London and in Yorkshire, he was regularly approached by black people who wished him well and informed him that Huddersfield had become their second favourite team. He had always been a strong advocate of football’s anti-racist initiatives and was a patron of Kick It Out. The campaign had started when Powell was at Southend, at a time when no one had ever spoken out against racism, and he had seen the campaign grow to organise weeks of action. As Charlton manager, he had insisted his players wore the T-shirts that had been boycotted by Roberts, Ferdinand, Lescott and others. He was dismayed by, rather than hostile to, the boycott, believing that the players were targeting the wrong organisation.
Powell considered that there had always been a large number of black coaches but their presence had been limited
to the grassroots game and therefore many coaches had the mindset that grassroots was it as far as coaching opportunities were concerned. The black coaches who came first, such as Keith Alexander and Leroy Rosenior, never got the opportunity to manage at a higher level even though they had good records, and there had been a general reluctance on the part of clubs to employ black coaches at anything higher than community or academy level. Powell therefore welcomed the implementation of a form of the Rooney Rule as an opportunity to increase the numbers of black coaches and allow others to raise their profiles through the interview process. Therefore, for Powell and his assistant Alex Dyer, who was with him at Charlton, the responsibility of being amongst a tiny number of black coaches provided inspiration to achieve success rather than a burden laden with expectations. Given the dearth of black coaches and the perpetual debate as to how the problem could be addressed, Powell was constantly sought by the media to express his views on the subject, but ultimately, he wanted to be judged on his success as a football manager, hoping that he could leave a mark that would open doors for others. He had been speaking on the Rooney Rule for over two years and hoped that in two years’ time the debate would be over. That, however, remains to be seen. Powell has always been an optimist.