Steve Coppell: Ready for lift-off

Brian Viner Interviews: Even the Reading manager admits his team are all but promoted to the Premiership, but he is taking very little else for granted, either about his club or about his job

There was a touch of spring in the air at the Reading FC training ground at Hogwood Park yesterday, and a touch of spring too in the step of Steve Coppell, whose dogged refusal to acknowledge the likelihood of Premiership football next season has finally started to waver. Reading are 16 points clear of second-placed Sheffield United with just seven games still to play, and Coppell no longer mentions Devon Loch, the racehorse that inexplicably sprawled within sniffing distance of the finishing post in the 1956 Grand National, because he knows that Devon Loch is no longer a suitable analogy for Reading failing to go up.

His team will secure promotion with a win at Leicester City tomorrow, and a draw or even a defeat might be enough depending on what happens to Leeds and Watford. Meanwhile, the bookmakers have Reading at 1-1,000 to win the Championship title, and to put that in perspective, they consider it as likely to happen as they consider unlikely the appointment of 1,000-1 shot Graham Taylor as next England manager.

So it seemed reasonable to ask Coppell, sitting in his Portakabin office, how he intends to celebrate if tomorrow's final whistle brings promotion.

"I'll go home and go to bed," he said, with a wry smile. He is not quite as Eeyore-ish as those basso profundo Scouse vowels make him seem, but clearly it will take more than promotion to get him dancing on table tops. "It might go tits-up on Saturday and I might be bladdered by half-past six, but I doubt it," he added.

While no longer bothering to deny that Premiership football next season is a dead cert, he insisted that his thoughts have not begun to turn to the 2006-7 campaign, nor even to the summer transfer market.

"I really haven't spent much time thinking about it," he said. "It's a waste of thinking time, really. There's just no point dwelling on what might be, because the reality will be different. We have agents forever phoning, saying 'my player's out of contract, would you be interested in taking him?' But that's the same at every club. I haven't sat down and thought 'I'm going for him, or for him'. And similarly I'm not thinking 'he has to go, or he has to go' about any players here. More than anything we've had great unity this season, and I want to keep that."

What, then, of his own contract, which concludes at the end of June? Could he envisage a situation in which he himself might not be at the Madejski Stadium next season? "I haven't thought about it. I'm comfortable doing things in one-year boxes.

"That's what suits me. I don't have any driving ambitions in football. I like working at a club where I'm wanted, because increasingly these days there are people at clubs where they're not wanted, or who don't want to be there.

"This is a progressive club trying to achieve things it's never done before, and that's a real stimulating environment, which in some ways is more important than winning things."

Wigan Athletic is surely a useful template for Coppell to examine, I suggested; an unfashionable team which, having won promotion from the Championship, is more than holding its own in the Premiership. After all, there are some striking parallels. Wigan's manager, Paul Jewell, is another Scouser and boyhood Liverpool fan, if never quite the player that Coppell was for Manchester United and, 42 times, for England.

Moreover, both clubs have chairmen - Wigan's Dave Whelan and Reading's John Madejski - with fortunes estimated at around £300m, who have committed plenty of their hard-earned brass to the pursuit of a dream, without ever losing sight of commercial realities.

"Well, you can bridge the gap [between Championship and Premiership football] with time, training and patience, or with money. Eight weeks are not enough to bridge it on the training field, so money has to make the shortfall. That's the chairman's domain, and I don't know what he's thinking. By his own admission he's a Reading fan but not a football fan. He doesn't have a great deal of knowledge about football, but he hires specialists to look after their own areas of expertise. That's comforting in an age when owners are coming in and wanting to pull all the strings.

"As for Wigan, I look with admiration at what they've done and how they've done it, but there's no blueprint. Every club has its own situation. And don't forget that Wigan didn't go up as champions, Sunderland did."

These were wise words from a man who got a university education before pursuing a top-level career in football, which not only makes him rarer than the dodo egg, but also condemns him to a reputation for brainpower that he doesn't altogether enjoy. Nevertheless, he conceded to me that he wanted to become a teacher before he became a professional footballer.

"I have mates who did become teachers and I know now that I couldn't have done it. It's far harder than what I do. Ridiculously hard. But if my career had run its course then I would definitely have tried something other than football. I would have found something that excited me."

Instead of running its course, however, Coppell's career ended when he was 28, the result of a bad knee injury. " I then spent three months in Amsterdam being treated by a physio over there, Richard Smith, who worked with Ajax and some other Dutch clubs. It was an opportunity to clear my head as well as treat my leg, and I found that the highlight of my week was sitting in Dam Square every Sunday morning drinking coffee and poring over the football reports in the English papers. I knew then that it was still in my system."

He duly became a manager, and distinguished himself with Crystal Palace (twice winning promotion and reaching an FA Cup final), Brentford and Brighton. The only blip on his CV is the curious episode with Manchester City, where he lasted only three weeks before walking out, citing stress. He declined yesterday to discuss the City business - "it's finished, dead!" - but it perhaps sheds some light on what he once said, that he doesn't really enjoy management.

"There are small aspects that I don't enjoy," he elaborated. "I don't like interference, whether from the media or an owner. But the job's magnificent. What I would say is that it's no substitute for playing. That buzz of running out at a stadium, the crowd. I've used the analogy of pimping before about management, but it's right, in a way.

"You live your professional life through other people, which has to be second best. It's a crazy job, really. You get too much praise when you're successful, and too much blame when you're not. And that is magnified in the Premiership. I'm not looking forward to that, the magnification of what is in essence a game."

Coppell said all this in his usual lugubrious style. Still, he might be a man who wears his heart up his sleeve, but it is clearly there somewhere, so I asked whether there is a particular club, Reading aside, that tugs on his emotions? "Well, I supported Liverpool as boy but I was with United for nine years, and saw what it has to offer. I always have a problem when Liverpool play United, but I would say now that I'm a United man."

A club, I ventured, which might be looking for a new manager in the next couple of years. A look came into his eye that was either a twinkle, or plain exasperation, I wasn't quite sure.

"Yeah, and what about the England job? You haven't mentioned that yet." Ah yes, I said, especially as he played football both at school and university with the chief executive of the FA, Brian Barwick. On which subject, what was Barwick like as a footballer?" A chuckle. "He was a rampaging right-back, not gifted but full of enthusiasm, with as much energy as his frame could dictate. I can't believe that he hasn't been on the phone about the England job. He's obviously leaving me until last, and then I'll come up on the rails." Stranger things have happened, Steve. Remember Devon Loch?