Football: Keegan adopts a new role and a five-year plan

Yesterday Britain's best-known unemployed football manager formally announced that, with immediate effect, he would be taking the reins at Fulham Football Club. Rupert Cornwell observed Kevin Keegan's arrival as the latest messiah of Craven Cottage.

A new era deserves a new title, and Kevin Keegan has one: not manager, general manager or coach, but "Chief Operating Officer". Ray Wilkins, Keegan's old England friend and colleague and Fulham's new team manager, will pick the team and, Keegan says, "be totally in charge of playing matters".

For the first few weeks, as he and Wilkins get to know the players, Keegan will to attend training sessions. "But in the afternoons I'll be putting on a suit. I don't plan to be with the squad every day, or sit in the dug-out every game, I've done all that."

But one wheel has come full circle. Just as he was when he started with Scunthorpe, or five years ago when he came to Newcastle, Kevin Keegan is back at at the lower end of the ladder, in the Second - really the Third - Division where Fulham have largely languished since they last featured in the top division almost 30 years ago.

Though the bushy dark curls of the halcyon years with Liverpool and Hamburg have long turned cropped and steel-coloured, he remains the likeliest of lads. The smile still darts and, the pale green eyes, set in a sports hero's eternal suntan, still bubble with enthusiasm. But yesterday he was oddly sombre. Maybe it was the presence of Mohammed Al Fayed beside him, impassive and buddha-like, wearing a black tie in mourning for his son Dodi and taking no questions.

Maybe, too, the Newcastle experience has left its mark. "I don't want to talk about Newcastle, this is Fulham's day," was all he would say when pressed on the enduring enigma of why, exactly, he left St James' Park.

Keegan swears he never lost his love for the game - he took little persuading after first being approached five days' ago -but even if he did, where better to rediscover it than Craven Cottage ?

It is an enchanting place, a home of football where football's cut- throat culture, at least until yesterday, seemed not to apply. It must be the only League ground with not a single building between it and a 16th century bishop's palace - and certainly the only one where you can turn your back on a dreary end-of-season League game on an April Saturday afternoon to enjoy a grandstand view of the Boat Race. Its legends include thoroughbreds like Johnny Haynes, a joker named Tommy Trinder and, for a magical few months in the mid Seventies, a tandem of clown princes called George Best and Rodney Marsh.

Now, thanks to Keegan and the mystique of Princess Diana, the place has cult written all over it. In a few years' time, the word Premiership may be written there too.

Old pro that he is, Keegan won't be tied to a precise target date to join football's elite. But, he admits, "we're talking about a five-year plan. Of course we want to be in the Premiership, just like about 30 other clubs." Few of them though have Fulham's trump cards. One is the Keegan name: an approach by the jettisoned manager Mickey Adams is one thing, blandishments from superstar Kevin himself are quite another. Then there is the Fayed money.

For Keegan himself that means a reported annual package of pounds 500,000, plus a five per cent stake in Fulham Leisure Ltd, the parent company of the football club. For team building purposes, it signifies tens of millions, though at this stage surely less than the pounds 60m John Hall made available at St James' Park. "We'll bring the best to Fulham," Keegan promises, "but they told me to run the club like it was mine -and that means I'm not throwing money away."

But neither he nor Wilkins, nor Arthur Cox the new chief scout, doubt for an instant they can attract quality players - and though he was silent in person yesterday, Fayed's press release was eloquent: "The fans can now judge my intentions are serious. This is just the beginning." And when Fayed gets serious, as rivals at Harrods and a posse of Tory MPs can testify, things tend to happen.

Indeed at Fulham, they already have, and not all of them pretty. The club may have gained Keegan, but at the risk of its reputation for cosy, smalltown niceness. No matter that the much-loved Adams guided Fulham to promotion from the Third Division in his first full season, and to the top half of the Second after eight games of this one. Alas, he wasn't famous enough. "I was told I could start with a clean sheet," Keegan said, for once discomforted when asked if Adams had any place in the new set- up. "Football is a tough game, we all know that."

Enough said. Where managers are concerned, fans' memories are short - did someone called Bruce Rioch really manage Arsenal 14 months ago ? And right now the omens in the nether regions of footballing SW6 are set fairer than for years. Money, style and celebrity, the coinage of late 20th century sport, have descended on Fulham Football Club.

"I'm in this for the long haul," Keegan burbled yesterday, talking of "the greatest challenge of my career, because it's the next one. I know some people treat this as a joke, but we have the chance to make them eat their words." The first comes on Saturday, not at St James' Park, Highbury or the San Siro, but away to Wigan.