I was sleeping on a pal’s sofa, now look at me!
CARDIFF KEEPER’S AMAZING RISE
FOR all the explanations of how Neil Warnock re-weaved a basketcase club, ranging from the barbecue he hosted in Cornwall to his subtle handling of Vincent Tan, the most enlightening insight came from Neil Etheridge.
The goalkeeper was still trying to take in the magnitude of promotion to the Premier League on Sunday when he hesitantly started telling his charming tale, only to stop himself and then start again. ‘Four years ago I left Fulham and was without a club for five months,’ he said, revisiting how he had gone from Chelsea’s academy to Fulham, before he was released in 2014, a 24-year-old with only a handful of lower-league loan appearances to his name. ‘I paid for myself to train at Charlton Athletic,’ he said. ‘I was close to the goalkeeping coach there and I just trained and waited.
‘It is a very hard industry to be in and a very hard industry to stay in. I had sold my house and my car and was about a week away from going back to the Philippines (where his mother is from). But I got offered a a contract with Oldham that winter.
‘I said to one of my mates, who just happened to live there, “Do you mind if I kip on your couch for however long I am up here?”
‘I ended up living on his couch for a month and Charlton took me in the transfer window.’
Four years on, via Charlton and Walsall, he is now a Premier League player in waiting. ‘I have been able to rectify my career,’ he said.
It is through the details of his story that you appreciate the personal value of a player reaching the top flight.
But on another level, it is undoubtedly the best way of understanding the key facet behind this most unlikely of promotions — the deliberate accumulation of discarded individuals with a bit of anger in their make-up and somethinghing to prove.
Indeed, Etheridgege was partially chosenn because of it, handpicked by a pensioner whose favourite trick through a record eight promotions has been man-management. As Etheridge put it: ‘At thee start of the season, thehe manager bought playerss who were hungry and had a point to prove.’
When asked if the promotion meant more because it came at the expense of Fulham, he smiled and said: ‘Next question.’
It says everything about a team built in Warnock’s image. He is a touchline pitbull who likes his players to have that same chip on their shoulders. Look at the team he used to secure promotion with a draw against Reading on Sunday — three free transfers, including Etheridge, one loanee and two players in Junior Hoilett and Sol Bamba who were free agents entirely.
The genius of the approach is that Cardiff spent less than £9million on transfers this season — their squad is estimated to havhave been only the 15th most expensive to assemble in the division sdivision — and their wage bbill is midtable.
Those are solid bbarometers of roughly wwhere a club should finfinish and certainly no one outside Cardiff expectedexpec they would ever be able to go up automatically. Even Warnock jokes that his squad had doubts.
He talks of a barbecue he arranged for the squad at his home in Cornwall last summer, having just saved them from relegation in his first season.
At that point, they were priced 33-1 to make the play-offs and he told the players they could get top six. In response, he says: ‘One or two thought I had been on the champagne.’
Equally important in all this has been Warnock’s ability to manage upwards. Tan and former manager Mackay clashed bitterly last time Cardiff were up, which was the root of the club’s implosion, but Warnock has cannily handled his employer.
Sometimes they ‘ agree to disagree’, they each say, but most of the dealings are conducted through chairman Mehmet Dalman and chief executive Ken Choo.
To date, there has been no murmuring of any discontent and the challenge is for Cardiff and Warnock to each show they can cope with the higher level.
It is understood by Sportsmail that Warnock will want as many as eight new faces for that mission — he suggested four to six publicly — and the feeling is he needs them to survive.
Most already suspect they won’t. But proving folk wrong has always been part of the Warnock deal.