Pardew a promotion man

By John Sinnott

Ex-West Ham boss Pardew is adept at running promotion campaigns

The bad news for Charlton fans is that relegation looks more than likely.

After the Boxing Day fixtures Charlton, with half their season gone, sat second from bottom in the Premiership, seven points adrift of fourth-from-bottom Sheffield United.

Of their remaining 19 league games, Charlton face away trips to top-six sides Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Bolton and Portsmouth, while Chelsea are set to visit The Valley on 3 February.

New boss Alan Pardew admitted as much when he was officially unveiled as Charlton manager on Boxing Day by saying: "I'd be naive if I didn't say the odds were stacked against us.

"We need to win half our games and that's a tough call."

The good news is that Pardew's managerial career shows he is more than adept at running a successful promotion campaign.

In 2002 he guided Reading to the Championship and in 2005 Pardew took West Ham back to the Premiership.

Since becoming Reading manager in 1999, Pardew's teams have been in three play-off finals and one play-off semi-final.

So if Charlton do go down this season, chairman Richard Murray and chief executive Peter Varney will have a seasoned campaigner already in place for the 2007/2008 Championship challenge.

For Pardew, Charlton offer the former West Ham manager a quick return to football after he was unceremoniously dumped by the Hammers' new owner Eggert Magnusson on 11 December.

And with the exception of their treatment of recent bosses Iain Dowie and Les Reed, Charlton have demonstrated they are patient employers, who are prepared to back their managers in the transfer market.

Both at Reading and West Ham, Pardew made a slow start before showing he was capable of producing sides that played entertaining football.

When Pardew took charge of Reading in 1999 the club were languishing in League One.

Four years later Reading were on the verge of promotion to the Premiership - before they lost to Wolves in a play-off semi-final.

Pardew made a similarly slow start at West Ham when he took charge in 2003.

Two-and-a-half years later the club were back in the Premiership and in May, West Ham were seconds away from a memorable FA Cup final win before Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard's dramatic stoppage-time intervention.

So Pardew clearly knows what it takes to make a football team tick.

Perhaps the one question mark about Pardew is his impetuosity.

The way in which he left Reading still leaves a bad taste in the mouth for many Royals fans.

That impetuosity could be seen in Pardew's unseemly spat with Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger - and a Football Association charge still hangs over the former West Ham manager over that unfortunate incident.

Pardew's decision to consent to West Ham signing Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano, also raised serious doubts about his managerial judgment.

The signing of the Argentine duo - deals that are still shrouded in mystery as to who owns the players and the lengths of their West Ham contracts - marked the beginning of the end for Pardew at Upton Park.

The Hammers went on a losing run of eight successive games, in the process crashing out of the Uefa Cup to Palermo and humiliatingly to Chesterfield in the Carling Cup.

It is hard to believe that when Pardew began preparing for the current season, Tevez and Mascherano were at the top of his transfer market targets.

Given how well West Ham had played on their return to the Premiership last season as well as reaching the FA Cup final, it seems barely credible that the club have struggled so badly during the current campaign.

What is clear is that the arrival of Tevez and Mascherano seriously undermined team spirit and Pardew was unable to do anything to resolve that crisis.

Having said that, if Charlton are relegated, Pardew is unlikely to be looking at world-class Argentine internationals when he thinks about what it will take to get the Addicks back to the Premiership.