Last updated at 17:07, Monday, 23 November 2009

This week I sat down to figure out Carlisle United’s man of the decade and into the mind’s eye appeared a figure in a suit, one in a tracksuit and one in blue-and-white kit with captain’s armband.

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The most significant trio of people in United’s last 10 years converged on Brunton Park at a similar time and today’s diverting task is to stack Fred Story, Paul Simpson and Kevin Gray in order of preference.

The context for what those men brought to the operation is the shambolic era that preceded their arrival. The earliest phase of the 2000-2009 period can be written off as a sporting soap opera about as popular and convincing as Eldorado, only with fewer viewers.

Truly, words struggle to describe the collapse in public spirits around Brunton Park as the Michael Knighton regime decayed and successive managers assembled excruciatingly limited teams for our weekly entertainment.

Remember those startlingly recent days when the Paddock would beckon another earnest but chaotic run from a Carl Heggs? Remember when all we had to hope for was that Ian Stevens would somehow attach himself to a morsel of quite pitiful midfield service?

Recall when Martin Wilkinson, one of the roll-call of non-achieving ‘gaffers’, hit upon the tantalising idea of fielding David Brightwell as a lumbering, emergency centre-forward? When Roddy Collins explained with a straight face that David Morley – a steady, jobbing, basement-league centre-half – was a top-flight midfielder of the future, before assembling one of the most indisciplined collections of players whose wages we supporters had ever paid?

And remember, more seriously, when you trudged down Warwick Road wondering if Carlisle United had much of a future at all, until John Courtenay replaced the late Knighton-era gloom with his own scattergun rule?

For levering Knighton out of office, Courtenay gets his own place in United’s pantheon. But we ought to judge our men of influence by the success they brought to Brunton Park. Which brings us to our competing trio, who pitched up in 2003 (Simpson and Gray) and 2004 (Story) respectively.

Story, the building millionaire, gets a sackful of points for rescuing a fading civic asset and making it viable again. Courtenay’s error was to hurl money at the operation without sufficient checks and controls.

Story’s triumph was to bring some clinical business thinking to a club many others wouldn’t have touched with kitchen tongs. Persisting with Simpson during the tough days of his early tenure was another victory. The business of tidying up Brunton Park, although aided by flood-related insurance money, occurred at an encouraging speed.

Ripping up United’s 14-year-old transfer record to buy Joe Garner in 2007 is worthy of mention. And if his subsequent hiring of John Ward on a four-year contract now appears unusually profligate, then that judgement is mainly taken through hindsight’s lens.

Simpson, now of Shrewsbury Town, is by umpteen furlongs United’s most significant manager since Mick Wadsworth, and arguably even more important given the raw materials that confronted him when he took office in 2003.

The discredited Collins had left behind an over-paid gathering of largely under-performing players, with a few notable exceptions such as Peter Murphy, Brendan McGill and Chris Billy. Simpson was the football man United’s hotseat craved.

How impressive was it to see him hose down that slovenly dressing room, turf out the good-time boys and replace them with hard professionals such as Tom Cowan, Paul Arnison, Andy Preece and Gray?

Credit also flies his way for the managerial alchemy that turned Karl Hawley, Derek Holmes and Michael Bridges into League Two’s most threatening strikeforce, with inspired acquisitions like Zigor Aranalde, Keiren Westwood and Chris Lumsdon further back.

The winning ethic that Simpson brought, leading to successive promotions before he decamped to Preston, was impressive enough. The rate at which he achieved this about-turn was more brilliant still.

In Gray, Simpson signed up the defender and leader whose resounding presence was too readily discarded by Neil McDonald in 2007 after four years of ample service.

When the centre-half was planted into the team in ‘03, United stopped losing games as a matter of course and almost plotted a stunning route to Football League survival, before springing back at the first attempt and then vaulting into League One a season later.

Scribblers like me should always hesitate before presuming to speak for the masses. But the ground could not be safer when I suggest that every single blue-shirted loyalist felt a good degree happier, more reassured, when Gray was tugging that armband over his bicep and snorting from the tunnel at the start of another Saturday afternoon.

He was the defender’s defender; the captain’s captain. The silky pass and athletic sprint were absent from his repertoire. But Gray got on with the business of heading, tackling, cajoling and inspiring.

How difficult it was to reconcile this considerable Yorkshireman with the player who had failed to perform in the slightest in his previous spell at Tranmere, and whose reputation had been shredded in a courtroom by an uncharacteristically controversial tackle (on Bradford’s Gordon Watson, whilst with Huddersfield in 1997)

Qualities like professionalism and discipline are sometimes hard to define, often concealed in a training-ground huddle or team-talk. In Gray they blazed away every time we clicked through a turnstile and watched him going about his weekly work on the grass.

There is a persuasive theory that says our football heroes should always be the men in boots, not the guys who handle the balance sheets or draw up the coaching drills.

That would normally get Gray an automatic vote, had the efforts of Story and Simpson not been felt in every corner of Brunton Park in those days of revival and renewal.

You can slide a cigarette paper between all three, for my money. But one distinct way of separating them is to observe that both Story and Simpson left the club of their own accord, at a time of their choosing (and were perfectly entitled to do so, by the way).

Gray, by contrast, had to be dragged from the premises.

Out there in countless lower-league arenas he personified Carlisle United’s transformation. In the gloriously simple business of kicking a ball, he was also its catalyst. It’s why the hunt for the Blues’ man of the decade ends with the garland hanging around his neck.

JColman@cngroup.co.uk

First published at 08:58, Saturday, 21 November 2009
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk