By Jon Colman

Last updated 08:47, Friday, 03 October 2008

Why on earth did you sell the club to him? What were you thinking? Shouldn’t you still be on your knees, begging forgiveness?

Andrew Jenkins (left) and Michael Knighton

Andrew Jenkins has tangled with the questions a hundred times these past few years. Even now, when we’re supposed to be discussing Carlisle United in 2008, his role in a new four-man ownership team, his blueprint for delivering Championship football to Brunton Park, securing a proper place for the club in the modern game...

Even now, when it’s supposed to be about today and tomorrow, not all those bleak yesterdays... Even now, he knows he can’t get to those matters until he’s dealt with the Knighton Issue first.

Why didn’t you tell him, ‘Thanks, but no thanks’? Couldn’t you see what was coming? Why…

Cut the questions there, because the answers are on their way. Carlisle United’s 72-year-old chairman is now back in 1992, at the very beginning of the most controversial episode in the old club’s history. Join him on the journey.

“The club was in a low way,” Jenkins recalls. “And the directors had decided to let it be known that we were looking for someone to take it on.

“Harry Gregg, who’d been our manager a few years before, had been in touch and said, ‘There’s someone who wants to meet you’. It was Michael Knighton. I went down to Preston to meet him, and of course he was a very good talker. He met the directors, told us how he wanted to develop the stadium, and he was very impressive.

“Here was this big, smart fella, and we didn’t have a lot of alternatives. There seems to be more multi-millionaires in this area than there used to be, but back then, Knighton was the only person interested and we thought if he had effectively taken Manchester United over, it must be easy for him to have Carlisle.

“People thought he was a rich guy. I remember asking the solicitor who did the takeover how much he had. He said he didn’t know. ‘Maybe it’s all offshore,’ he said. We couldn’t really find out. But before long he had Carlisle people eating out of his hands. He set the town on fire.

“He was making these promises about getting us to the Premier League, which we took with a pinch of salt. He was a character who obviously wanted more glory than the players. But we went along with him, tried to help him, and to begin with he did everything right. The players he brought in…the promotions we had…Wembley twice…the young players that came through and went for big money, like Matt Jansen…it’s just a pity he didn’t invest what he got back in the team. That was when the rot set in, really.”

United's decline under Knighton, from 1998 to 2002 when he was eventually prised out of Brunton Park, was as steep as the rise he had previously engineered. In the beginning: the titles and the glory. Then the road to hell: appointing himself manager, the endless scrapes with relegation, the startling chapter in 2001 when he almost sold up to a penniless curry-house waiter, and those ominous threats to close the club for good, before he departed to unprecedented rancour and dipped completely from public view.

Where did it all go wrong? Jenkins, who observed the climb and then the dramatic drop from his boardroom vantage point, offers this blunt appraisal: “He ran out of money, pure and simple. He started to come under pressure from ourselves on the board. Then he got the wrath of the supporters, and that’s when things really started going wrong.” The Stephen Brown affair being the classic case in point.

“I’d heard that this Brown chap who was coming to buy the club had been living in sheltered housing,” Jenkins continues. “But Michael said the guy had sold a hotel abroad and he was very wealthy. He was adamant about that.

“I remember when Brown first came to meet us. He pulled me to one side and said, ‘You and I could really run this football club’. He went from bar to bar in the club, having one drink after another. Apparently he was buying people all sorts of drinks in his hotel as well. By this time we were onto him. I knew this lad in Galashiels, who had put Brown out of his pub. ‘He’s just a crook,’ he said. He’d been working in a curry house, apparently. So we told Michael all this. And the next thing we knew, Brown was gone.

“He was obviously a salesman who pulled the wool over Michael’s eyes, the way salesmen sometimes do. But people were laughing at Carlisle United, and that was the most awful thing about it. Maybe that’s the way Michael wanted it to be by that stage.”

With that in mind, does Jenkins believe Knighton was serious about his threats to padlock the gates at Brunton Park and watch United rot away, claiming infamously that the people of Carlisle did not deserve a football club? “He never said those words to me, but the way things were going… I remember one night in that period, I came down to the club for a drink – as I often would – and the bar was closed, everything was dark and there wasn’t a soul around. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, he means it’.

“But the lad on the bar had just forgotten to come down and open up.”

He chuckles at the anecdote, but frowns when he returns to the subject of United’s drift towards financial ruin in the last days of Knighton. “Lord Clark and John Nixon did a great job holding the revenues people off, because they were coming down on us all the time,” Jenkins says. “They delayed them until we had a chance to see where we were going. Eventually, John Courtenay came in and we got out of administration. You always think something or someone will come along, but when you’re as close as we were…it doesn’t really bear thinking about.

“In hindsight, I do wish we had tried to hang on a bit longer, when Michael first came in. If the board then had stuck it out for another year instead of selling up, we would have had those young players coming through like Jansen, Rory Delap and the rest, and we’d certainly have used the money that came in more wisely

“Maybe we would have been ok without Knighton after all. In all my time here, I suppose that’s my one regret.”

Jenkins has been energised by United’s subsequent revival, first under Courtenay’s chaotic rule, and then under Fred Story’s more progressive business-based regime, on which he and his fellow owners now seek to build after this summer’s takeover. But then, haven’t we all? Can’t he instead tell us some things we don’t know about Carlisle’s restorative years, and, while he’s at it, about himself? Yes, as it happens.

1) When Paul Simpson was preparing to leave for Preston in 2006, Jenkins scribbled the following names on his shortlist: Brian Horton, Colin Cooper, Kevin Ball, Russell Slade, Danny Wilson, John Ward. “I think Cooper and Ball are managers of the future,” says Jenkins. “The others would have been a safe pair of hands. But John Ward was always the one for me. When we first tried to get him, Fred put a helicopter on and we flew him up here. In the end, Cheltenham gave him a new five-year contract and we went for Neil McDonald instead. But I’m glad we got him second time round.”

2) United might twice have left Brunton Park in recent times. “John Courtenay was approached by Kingmoor Park once. They were looking for retail development and there was an idea to have a new stadium up there. It never happened, but there was a time before that – before Knighton’s days – when there was another company who wanted to buy the ground itself for a retail development. If the council had been able to find us another site, it could have happened. But they were tied up with building Asda at the time, and they didn’t want to know.”

3) There were tears in Jenkins’ eyes when United won promotion back into the Football League at Stoke’s Britannia Stadium in 2005, and when he carried the League Two championship trophy onto the pitch a year later. And he isn’t ashamed to admit there are other times when the Blues cause his eyes to fill. “When we get a really big gate, such as the Leeds game last year, it gets me,” he says. “To see the team running out in front of that kind of crowd…it’s so nice to see.”

4) Fred Story might not be United’s ex-owner forever. “I’m really sorry Fred’s gone, and I think he’ll miss it,” says Jenkins. “You never know – in a year or two, he might come back. If anybody comes along who wants to take the club on, by the way, we won’t stand in their way. But they aren’t queuing up. The guy from Edinburgh Woollen Mill (Philip Day) is on the board and helping us. He’s quite a wealthy fella, certainly above the four of us in that respect. But whether he’ll want to do something more with it down the line, we don’t really know.”

5) When he collected a long-service award from the Football League earlier this year, Jenkins was taken aback by the reaction of his peers. “John Madejski from Reading came over to shake my hand and said, ‘That would look nice in the toilet’. But everyone was so pleased for me. After 49 years on the board, people say I must be mad, but I don’t see it that way.”

6) Despite the stinging experience of the Knighton fall-out; despite the public clamour for another money man; despite the widespread worries about the ambition of the new controlling quartet (Jenkins, Nixon, David Allen and Steve Pattison); and despite his own advancing years, Jenkins had no reservations about becoming United’s joint owner in July. And to the supporters calling for far greater resources to be lavished on the operation, he says: “If they want that, they’ll have to find somebody.

“Going out and spending money and making a big noise isn’t always the answer. We are local men who will run it sensibly, and we won’t be running away. I think we might surprise people.

“If we want to get to the Championship and survive, we need some of our home-grown lads to come into the pool of players, to help the wage bill. Fortunately we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with the work Eric Kinder is doing with the youth set-up. But you do appreciate what you are up against when you’ve got the likes of Leicester in the division – their wage bill is £9 million, and ours is £1.5 million.”

He offers an unconvincing smile as he sketches this picture of a changing game with which he is constantly battling to keep up. “Some of the new things, like ticket systems, pass me by now,” he adds. “They are for the younger men to get to grips with. I’m just here to help, to pass on bits of advice. Basically, I will stay here as long as I’m wanted. As long as I can be of use.”

The year is 2007. It’s a sharp winter’s morning and Andrew Jenkins and his wife, Diane, are in Leyburn, North Yorkshire, to look at some furniture at Tennants’ auctioneers. Afterwards, they’ll get a bar meal and make a day of it. All is calm, until Andrew spots a plump figure in the big blue overcoat, and an unshaven man of about 30 a couple of paces back.

“It was Michael,” Jenkins recounts. “And the other lad was Mark, his son. He couldn’t believe it when I went up to him. I would recognise that big coat anywhere, and Michael was just as he always was.

“He said antiques were always his second love, after football. That’s why he was there. Once he got over the shock, he was the perfect gentlemen with me and the wife, and he asked after a couple of the directors from his time at the club. But he wasn’t very kind about the supporters. ‘They ruined my life,’ he said.

“Apparently he was commuting between here and the Channel Islands. But he didn’t really let on what else he was doing. He was full of talk, of course. We were on about the guy who ran the auction rooms, and he said, ‘I was instrumental in setting this man up,’ things like that. He was some boy, was Michael.”