NINE points clear at the top of the league in January.

In that situation, only someone who likes doing things the hard way would swap it for a relegation battle.

Enter Shaun Teale.

The stroll towards the Preston and District League championship as boss of Tarleton Corinthians is now replaced by the uphill hike of trying to restore Chorley as a non-league force.

But then, even for someone who's wallowed in the pampered surroundings of the Premiership, he's well used to toughing it out.

In fact, Teale himself has a slightly more blunt way of describing his trawl through the lower leagues: "Slumming it."

He added: "It's been a good grounding to have a career starting in non-league. You don't get the nice boots and you go into changing rooms where the showers don't work.

"It's not like I'm going to say, 'I played in the Premiership, there's no way I'm getting changed in that heap!'

"You get on with it. At the moment I'm just made up to be back in a job."

Had Teale been born 12 years later he might not have to worry about working at all because in both 1990 and 1993, he was a top flight runner-up with Villa.

If you achieved a similar status in the game today, it's fair to assume your wage packet wouldn't exactly have you worrying about what you were going to do when you were 35 and your knees were knackered.

But this was long ago in a galaxy before television fat cats corrupted traditional kick-off times and the Champions League cash cow was yet to be milked for all it's worth.

Nowadays, the only reminder the 40-year-old centre half has of those early 90s glory days comes in the form of Chorley midfielder Chris McGrath, a frighteningly exact replica of his father Paul, Teale's defensive partner in crime.

He did make a dream return to Villa Park when he completed his first season in management by leading Burscough to one of non-league's greatest shocks when they lifted the FA Trophy at his old second home in 2003.

However, once the hangovers had disappeared, reality kicked in and he resigned - which he also did less than a year later after just half a season in charge of Northwich Victoria.

But he is keen to refute suggestions that his stop-start managerial career is due to his big-time past dwarfing smaller clubs' ambitions.

Teale said: "The Burscough thing was a well publicised fall-out and when you leave under those circumstances people think 'he's going to come here and cause trouble'.

"That sits on you a bit but people thought I caused all the problems, which was far from the truth.

"There were rumours that I wanted more money but I never asked for any more money than they ever gave me.

"We wanted to take the team forward but a week after we won the FA Trophy the wage budget had been cut by £1,000 and that's not taking a team forward. I felt I was wasting my time.

"After winning the FA Trophy, everybody wants to speak to you and everybody wants to know you, but next thing you're out of a job.

"But sometimes you have to take that on the chin and go and find something else to do."

Which he did the following December with a return to Northwich, the starting point of a professional career path that took in Bournemouth, Villa and Tranmere after Harry Redknapp snapped him up from Weymouth in the mid-1980s.

But he inherited a team averaging half a point a game and already destined to finish bottom of the Conference when their third boss of that season took the reins.

Teale looks back and laughs when he calls the job "the poisoned chalice" but there was certainly a nasty taste in the mouth as soon as he took over.

"I took training and went into the dressing room and I was introduced by the chairman as caretaker, a word which had never even been mentioned," recalls Teale.

"I thought we would be re-building for the following season but when you hear 'caretaker' you think things aren't quite right.

"At Northwich we were caretakers for the rest of the season and there was never any guarantee I was going to get the job.

"We did well with what we were given but the chairman wasn't going to put himself in a position where he gave me the job before the end of that season so I decided there was no point being there, travelling round the country when it could be all for nothing.

"So, because of that, when I met Ken Wright for the Chorley job it was cards on the table.

"When an opportunity comes up you take it with both hands because it's very difficult to get a job."

Vics were spared relegation only by the technicalities of other clubs' misfortunes but Teale is unlikely to have such luck again if Chorley finish in the bottom two of UniBond Division One.

However, unlike last year, at least he has a fighting chance. In his first game in charge last Saturday, a 2-0 win at Shepshed hauled his team three points clear of the drop zone going into today's home game with Ossett Albion.

And he insists he is unfazed by the previously unsettled air around Victory Park, which has made him the club's sixth manager in as many years.

Teale said: "I said to Ken I wanted the job but not under circumstances where it was 'keep us up or you're back out of a job.'

"That's not good for anyone and it's going to look like he's made a bad appointment.

"It's got to be a building process and we're not going to become world beaters overnight.

"We have to climb up the table and then start to re-build with a new budget."