Last updated 11:54, Saturday, 08 November 2008

There is one way that Greg Abbott can instantly retrieve some of Carlisle United’s lost credibility, and it has nothing to do with applying the heavy roller to the 23rd-best team in the Blue Square Premier, such is his task this afternoon.

Inspiration: Former Carlisle United captain Kevin Gray working on a friend’s traction engine at Silloth Vintage rally. Inset: Gray celebrates United’s promotion back into the Football League with Paul Simpson in 2005

What needs to come out of the printer at the top of the caretaker manager’s agenda is not Grays Athletic, but Gray, Kevin: the embodiment of the hard, professional values which seem to have fled from Brunton Park these past few painful weeks.

The following message comes with due apologies to Darren Edmondson, the manager of Workington Reds to whom Gray has committed perhaps the final, or at least penultimate season of his playing career.

But the suggestion from this end is that if Abbott is looking for a way to get Carlisle’s locomotive properly back on track, he could do worse than summon a man who is currently laid up with a knee injury and whose passion for prodding at steam engines must be keeping insanity at bay with every wasted Saturday afternoon just now.

Gray is booked in for an operation on December 18 when he puts the remainder of his career in the hands of the NHS. But Abbott, in his own role as repair man, could pip the surgeons and get his mitts on the 36-year-old first by offering him a place in his backroom ranks at United.

Gray’s stats from three-and-a-half years as a Carlisle player – 145 games, 12 goals – tell only a scrap of the tale of what he delivered to the club after striding up from Tranmere in 2003.

For the rest, simply speak to any team-mate who rose under the Yorkshireman’s indomitable captaincy (Danny Livesey, for example), any manager (Paul Simpson, Neil McDonald) who relied quite heavily on his presence, and any supporter who felt heartened that Carlisle would never enter battle without backbone as long as Gray was the first man stomping out of the tunnel.

As skipper, Gray led Carlisle out of the Conference, out of League Two and then to decent heights in League One before McDonald dispensed with the ageing combatant in the summer of 2007 – too readily, if you ask many people around Brunton Park and certainly if you solicit the views of Fred Story, the former owner who admired Gray like no other player.

For all these reasons, hooking him back into the operation down Warwick Road carries the ring of an inspired move, even if it would need to be done after considerable thought and cautious planning.

The faint calls for Gray to return as manager plainly need to be resisted, since what Carlisle need right now is a more obvious strategist who can plot a path out of their troubles near the foot of the third tier.

Abbott, while a managerial unknown quantity in many respects, has umpteen coaching years and a tidy caretaker stint already behind him, and therefore scores higher in this department than an old pro who has only recently started working through his coaching badges, and who has never given the impression that football consumes his every thought, the way it absorbs the hungriest of bosses.

“It’s nice to get away from it,” he once told me, explaining why he so enjoyed throwing on some smudged overalls and Fred Dibnah cap and working at his hobby at the end of a day’s training. “I don’t want to go home and watch football on TV or read football magazines.”

The point is that Carlisle do not need Gray’s tactical acumen, his knowledge of systems and shapes. But they do require some of the qualities he stood for during his golden times at the club: authority, experience and a firm intolerance of anything which represented a lowering of the required standard.

Without putting the shoe in on John Ward again, those elements did not show up in many Carlisle performances during the former manager’s excruciating long goodbye, and the need to restore them seems urgent now that the Blues are teetering one point and one place above the relegation zone.

Again: the detail of any reaching out for Gray would need to be carefully written. Please, let nobody at Brunton Park call the defender forward and then dump him in a faux-ambassadorial role or render his duties coaching-lite; cones, clipboards, but no proper influence.

We’ll see through any such PR enterprise. But if Abbott can find a genuine job for one of the best captains in United’s history – say, defensive coach doubling up as training ground enforcer – let him do so without delay.

To Workington fans who object to the idea of their showpiece summer signing being whisked away before he’s played a single competitive game at Borough Park: yes, I understand. And any Carlisle supporter with misgivings about the concept of appointing a cult hero when there isn’t a vacancy will get a fair hearing from this column.

But the Blue sceptic also needs to tackle this simple question: wouldn’t you just feel better with Kevin Gray around the place? And does that really require an answer?