Fulham manager Chris Coleman is confident he can overcome all the challenges facing him this Premiership season.
It will be the former Wales and Fulham defender’s first full season in the hot seat and the Premiership’s youngest boss boasts a managerial career that spans just five games.
In the cut throat world of top-level management Coleman will have little scope to learn from his mistakes, especially at a club keen to avoid a repeat of last season’s flirtation with relegation.
After an early start in the InterToto Cup, Fulham’s 2002-03 campaign nosedived as the temperature fell, and an atrocious run of results culminated in Jean Tigana’s dismissal.
Coleman arrived as caretaker-manager making his intentions clear.
“I am not interested in the job,” said Coleman. “I’ll give it my best shot until the end of the season and enjoy it – but then that’s it.”
Not so.
Three wins and a draw in his five games, while conducting himself in a dignified, assured way, saw owner Mohammed Al Fayed persuade him to take the job permanently.
Now Coleman is ready for his first real test, over the full duration of a 38-game season and against a backdrop of dwindling finances and uncertainty over the future of key players such as Sean Davis.
Not that the pressure is phasing the pragmatic Welshman, whose playing career was ended by a horrific car crash in January 2001.
“I’m learning all the time,” Coleman told BBC Sport. “Obviously I’m inexperienced, I know that, but I’m loving every minute of it.
“No doubt I will make mistakes along the way and I need to learn pretty quickly.”
And Coleman is under no illusions that the good results his Fulham team achieved last season will count for much if the Cottagers struggle in the early stages.
“I think we have got to start off the season like we finished the last one,” he added. “I will be judged this season because we are starting from scratch and I understand that.
“I’ll take anything that comes and hopefully we will be as successful as the last five games.”
“If we start off like that I will be more than happy.”
Allied to Coleman’s positive intentions is a determination to ensure that Fulham are not regarded as a soft touch.
“We cannot afford to sit back and relax.
“We have go to play more of a British-style game. I don’t mean knock it long, but we have got to be a bit more frantic and we have got to work a bit harder when we have not got the ball.”
And if Coleman can instil that philosophy into his cosmopolitan band of players, he just might defy the bookies – who have him as one of the favourites for the sack – and last the distance.
