‘Sometimes you have to take a step out to relight the fire’
Charlie Austin is loving life at West Brom after leaving Southampton on a sour note, he tells John Percy ‘Hasenhuttl thought I was disruptive, but that wasn’t the case. I always felt that he wanted to be the No1’
It is a cold winter morning at West Bromwich Albion’s training ground and Charlie Austin is sitting in the sparse media room, reflecting on the dog-eat-dog environment of the Championship. He turned 30 in July and has spent much of the past five years in the Premier League, earning an England call-up along the way, yet this move to the Hawthorns is far from a retrograde step.
In the summer he was training with Southampton’s under-23s, after being transfer-listed by Ralph Hasenhuttl, but now he could not be happier as he assesses the 46-game slog for promotion. West Brom are hoping to return to the top of the table when they face Swansea City at home today and are establishing a reputation as the division’s great entertainers under Slaven Bilic, while Austin has been the match-winner in two of the past three games.
“This is what I needed to get that spark back into my career, to enjoy my football again and score goals in a winning team,” he says. “Sometimes you have to take a step out to relight the fire, poke the bear and have a right go at this again. I’ve still got the hunger and, yeah, a point to prove. Everybody loves playing in the Premier League, don’t they? I don’t want to be a bit-part player, I want to be right in the mix with everybody else.”
Austin has scored five goals since his £4 million move on deadline day, which took him back to the Championship for the first time since January 2016. He already has one promotion on his CV, with Queens Park Rangers, and West Brom appear title favourites in a division renowned for its unpredictability. “It’s still a crazy league,” he says. “Nothing has changed, it’s 100 miles an hour. It’s still entertaining, great to be involved in and the Championship is the league everyone wants to get out of.
“The play-offs are the sexy way to get promoted, playing in front of 90,000 people at Wembley, but you always want to do it automatically. If you come first or second, ultimately you’ve been better than the other teams over
46 games. There’s a handful of other lads in our dressing room that know it’s one of their best chances of having a good crack at getting back in the Premier League.”
Austin is focusing only on the future, but his departure from Southampton clearly still rankles. He scored 20 goals in 81 games but the appointment of Hasenhuttl in December signified a change and he started just four league games. Instructed to train with the under-23s for six weeks over the summer, he was also left at home when the first team flew to Austria for a training camp.
“If it had happened five years earlier in my career, I would have handled it completely differently – badly,” he reflects. “I just felt the chance would never come. Listen, I knew my role in the team and on the pitch you couldn’t really fault my effort, team spirit or character. His opinion of me must have been that my character was disruptive for the team, when that wasn’t the case.
“I’m a big, loud character and some people don’t like that. I always felt that he wanted to be the No1. I never disputed he was the manager. Football changes so quickly and it’s all about opinions – his opinion of me is probably very similar to my opinion of him. I’m just glad that chapter has closed.”
Austin is now revitalised under Bilic, and was one of nine summer signings with goalscorers a priority after the departures of Dwight Gayle and Jay Rodriguez (who scored 46 goals between them last season). With Bilic favouring a 4-2-3-1 formation, West Brom have played some breathtaking football, with Brazilian winger Matheus Pereira and Grady Diangana, signed on loan from West Ham United, emerging as two of the Championship’s standout players. Yet there are other key performers, such as midfielder Romaine Sawyers (a £3million snip from Brentford), defender Semi Ajayi and goalkeeper
Sam Johnstone.
“I’d never heard of Matheus, but he’s been fantastic. Grady has been brilliant,” says Austin. “But Sam, the back four and two holding midfielders are the unsung heroes. We’ve got a great squad and players that can win us games of football, but on the flip side there’s players with that experience and knowledge who can get us points, too.”
And what of Bilic? The former Croatia manager with the runaway beard has lost only one Championship game and is earning cult hero status at the Hawthorns. “He’s been brilliant, from the moment I spoke to him on deadline day,” says Austin. “He sold his vision to me, what he wanted to achieve, and where I fitted in. He’s very similar to Sean Dyche – chilled to a certain degree but when he needs to get his point across, or if you cross the white line, he’ll soon let you know. “Nobody in the dressing room takes it too far or tries to push boundaries, because when that starts happening the cracks start appearing, unfortunately. I’ve been involved at a club where that happened before and it only goes one way. At QPR away, he was fed up with the music in the dressing room and put his own stuff on. I think it was Metallica. Nobody dared tell him to turn it off.” Before Austin leaves for training, he reflects on his career journey, which started in Berkshire nonLeagues while holding down a job as a brickie getting up at 6am. “It has gone so fast but I’ve loved it,” he says. “You have to take the ups, because there are so many downs in football. Everyone thinks, ‘You must be so happy, as you earn X amount a week’. P--- off. That ain’t the case. “If you have a bad day at work, it’s no different to anyone else. Going home to your wife and kids, you still take a bad day home. You have to make sacrifices: I’m not crying, but things like Christmas, missing birthdays, cramming in holidays with your kids. It’s part and parcel of being a footballer. But would I change it? Absolutely not.”
‘Slaven has been brilliant, from the moment I first spoke to him. He sold me his vision’