Alan Curbishley, known as being one of England's more cerebral managers, had it all worked out. He had plotted the slow but steady trajectory of his Charlton project and had foreseen at what point it would reach its natural limit and all fall to pieces. Luckily for him he knew that the England job would soon be coming up for grabs.

"Imagine that the Charlton job is a WWII era rocket, like the V2 say, and the England job is a massive Saturn V. All I had to do was predict the fast speed of the England job as it left the reality of Earth, parachute down into it and take off into the stratosphere (followed, of course, by my inevitable but patriotic destruction)."

Unfortunately for Curbishley, he hadn't got his sums quite right.

"Amusingly, I hadn't realised that the launch date for the England job was put forward and that Steve McLaren was already taken off on his mission to the outer realms of believability. Then I landed backwards into an old biplane called West Ham, recently vacated by Pards, and I am currently plummeting towards the ground and a crash landing."

Bizarrely, Alan Pardew had hitched a ride on a broken piece of fuselage from Curbishley's broken Charlton project.

"The bookies are wondering which of us will hit the ground first. When two managers are falling simultaneously, their velocity depends on how much board backing there is behind them and how weighed down they are by overpaid Argentinian World Cup stars plus the intense media pressure as you hurtle to your doom. It's nice to be back."