CURTIS Fleming joked he was more “painter and decorator” than Vincent Van Gogh as he reflected on the influences in his playing and coaching career ahead of taking charge of his first Charlton Athletic game this weekend.
Former Middlesbrough and Crystal Palace defender Fleming, 55, was named interim head coach after the Addicks sacked Michael Appleton on Tuesday night. Fleming had only joined as assistant head coach the previous week.
Charlton haven’t won in ten League One games and are only four points above the relegation zone. They travel to eighth-place Blackpool tomorrow.
“When I coach I work a lot from my playing days, not because I played at a level or anything like that,” Fleming said in his pre-match media briefing. “I played with some really good players which is lovely, but I wasn’t a good player. I always say we were both painters – they were Van Gogh and I was a painter and decorator!
“I had Bryan Robson as a manager for seven years and I’m not name-dropping because he was a bit of a legend. He wasn’t a brilliant coach, but what a man, what a man. You’d go to war for him and I get a little bit like that now even when I speak about him because he’s a good man.
“I think that is half the battle, when you play there is so much going on and it’s great to have people you can trust. He used to drop us and we would thank him because he’d say, ‘You’re not playing this week but you will next week.’
“I was also lucky enough to have Terry Venables for a short period of time and I loved his simplicity. Out of the coaches I worked with he was probably the best. Tony Pulis also gave different messages and you always learned.
“Nigel Pearson, who I have worked with over the past few years, has got teams up to the Premier League and built clubs up. You learn good bits and there are certain bits that I wouldn’t do. When you get to my age and you’ve been around a bit, you’re going to know what you are and know what you have to do to be you. You won’t see me in a three-piece suit on Saturday because I’m doing one game. That’s just me.”
Fleming isn’t shying away from the fact that Charlton need to stop their current run, and quickly.
“We can look at the form, but we have to change that,” he said. “There’s no doubt that the results have to pick up, we haven’t kept a clean sheet in fourteen games – we need to keep a clean sheet.
“You have to work at that, you can’t just shove it under the table. You can’t go out every game and say, ‘I’ll tell you what, you have to win by two or three’. You have to work on getting a clean sheet. It’s not just the defenders, it’s the whole team and the substitutes that come on.
“We’re in a battle, there’s no doubt about it. It’s a battle every day because we have to be in a better position than we are. We think we should be and think we have the squad to be and we’re not. The battle is for us to get better.
“I’d rather be looking up than down, but we have got to stand up and say, ‘Look, what is happening?’ We spoke to the lads about it again today. Words are great, words are lovely but words mean nothing without action. You can say you’re going to do this and do that, but it ends up as hot air if there’s no action. We go away to a very good team on Saturday and we need to be on it.”
