COLIN Addison was watching Wolves at Molineux when the call came.

He’d played out the endgame of a second spell in charge of Newport County with the club on its way to closure, so that dank dug-out at Somerton Park was a world away from what he was being offered.

A friend who functioned as one of football’s “fixers” found Colin contemplating over his next move – and made up his mind. Just 10 days later the heat was on.

“Qatar... bloody hell. If you told me then that they’d have a World Cup...”

Colin lets the words lead his thoughts back some 25 years.

He’s stepping into a sweltering, shimmering Al-Ahly stadium for the first time, tasked with taking the club of the same name out of the doldrums.

Al-Ahly of Doha had slumped to second from bottom of the Qatari first division. Colin, and his assistant Richie Norman, had the second-half of the season to claw ‘The Eagles’ back into the position expected of them.

“It was only going to be a short term thing,” says Colin.

“A chance to get back in.”

Colin wasn’t walking into a football wilderness. In 1985 the game in the Gulf was on the up. Qatar’s own talented teens had wowed the World Youth Cup in Australia four years earlier, going all the way to a final they lost to the then West Germany. And Kuwait – where Colin was to coach later in his career – had contested the 1982 World Cup in Spain.

A new wave of Brazilian coaches, including some of the best players of a generation, had swamped the region slaking its thirst for technique on the ball.

In Qatar that season, though, the Anglo-Saxon approach of former Bristol City boss Alan Dicks was, quite literally, making the running as his Al- Rayya side raced to the top of the table. Colin’s brief was simple: catch them up.

An emphasis on the physical side of the game, harnessed to a newly-imposed discipline on and off the field – like turning up to training on time, if at all – seemed to bring the best out of the natural enthusiasm and disparate talent Colin found in his team.

“Their knowledge of the game was already good and improving. We set out to make things more professional and the players responded,” says Colin.

So did Al-Ahly’s backers, who urged Colin to stay, having seen results pick up enough to give the side a shot at a title, although they eventually missed out by the narrowest of margins to Al- Rayya.

But the call at Molineux that had set up that sixth-month stint came about through long-time contacts with whom Colin did not want to lose touch, and he still hankered for another go at the English game. So Qatar kick-started the second-half of a managerial career that saw him take over as boss at West Bromwich Albion after a season in Spain with Celta Vigo.

It was only eight years ago that Colin bowed out – from Barry Town, having gone as high as Atlético Madrid.

As fond as he still is of his time in Qatar and the “fivestar”

footballing scene he enjoyed, seeing the nation named as 2022 World Cup host takes some getting used to, he said. “Out there then you could sense something happening.

You were always thinking how far the game out there could go, but as for hosting a World Cup... the same things being said then are being said now,” says Colin.

Not that he has any doubts about the Qataris ability to organise the occasion.

“They’ll do it right, no question,”

he says. And as for going back in 2022? He might just fancy that too.