CARL Fletcher is adamant. He does not regret cutting his managerial teeth with Plymouth Argyle.

No matter that he was unceremoniously sacked on New Year’s Day, 2013, following fifteen months in the post.

In fact, he’s grateful for the head-spinning experience. Fletcher took on the job with his eyes open. He was the club captain when, with Plymouth mired in administration, he was asked to replace the dismissed Peter Reid.

Fletcher doesn’t pretend his decision-making is flawless, however. He was wrong, he confesses, to chase the cash when he left West Ham for Crystal Palace in 2006.

But his earlier call to leave AFC Bournemouth, the place where he was happiest? That, he says, was the “best thing I ever did”.

None of this is intended to paint Fletcher as a contradictory individual.

Rather, he’s a man who hurtles into every fresh challenge with a rare zeal – and emerges the other side wiser for it.

He reflects unsparingly on his first – and still only – taste of management.

“It was too early for me, definitely,” he says of the position he accepted at the tender age of 31.

“I wasn’t ready. If I wasn’t captain would they have offered me the job? Probably not.

“The first bit when we stayed up was really good. The second season was OK, but there were loads of little of things, I realise now, I didn’t get right – things I should have got right: recruitment, how I trained… but I learned so much from it.

“If we’d kept winning, it wouldn’t have done me any good. I wouldn’t have learned anything from it, I would have got by.

“But things weren’t right.

“I wasn’t getting my point across properly in training – what’s in here (taps head), how do you get it across so the players can take it on board and do it on a game day?”

You’d be forgiven, listening to his self-flagellation, for assuming Fletcher’s voyage into management was an abject failure.

It wasn’t.

Plymouth, with one point from nine matches, were cut adrift at the foot of League Two when Fletcher – who originally signed for the club from Crystal Palace in 2009 – succeeded Reid, initially on a stop-gap basis.

He soon assumed full-time charge and a previously directionless side lost only seven of its final 28 matches to avoid falling out of the Football League.

The following season was four-and-a-half months old when he was shown the door.

“After leaving Plymouth I had about five months when I needed time out,” says Fletcher.

“Management was 18 months of being glazed: you go home and the kids are there, but not really.

“It was good to spend time with the family and gain some perspective on football.”

Fletcher had pulled on his boots again for a brief playing stint with Barnet when, in January 2014, Eddie Howe asked him to manage Cherries’ under-18 team.

That heralded a return to his first footballing love; the club where he made the same journey from academy system to first-team he is now tasked with overseeing for the youngsters under his control.

His greatest day as a Cherries player came in the 2003 Third Division (now League Two) play-off final. He skippered Sean O’Driscoll’s side and scored twice as they beat Lincoln 5-2.

One year later Fletcher was heading for West Ham.

“Moving was the best thing I ever did,” he says. “Not just from a playing point of view, but from a life perspective – to actually get out of Bournemouth and go to London.

“You can get in a comfort zone in Bournemouth. You’ve got the beach, the nice weather – then you go to London, it was like ‘wow, this is a massive culture shock’.

“But I’m so pleased I did it, because it made me a better person.”

He spent two “great” years at West Ham, promoted from the Championship in 2005 and then making the 12 Premier League appearances he holds dear to this day.

The standout memory, though, is the 2006 FA Cup final. Fletcher recoils at mention of the recently retired Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool icon whose blistering stoppage time strike ripped the trophy from the Hammers’ grasp.

Fletcher had been replaced when his team led 3-2 and could only watch on helplessly as the Merseysiders ultimately triumphed in a penalty shoot-out.

“We were 30 seconds away from winning it - that doesn’t hit you until you retire,” he says.

“We’d played Liverpool a couple of weeks earlier and Hayden Mullins was sent off.

“His suspension gave me the opportunity to play, which was great. But, on the flip side, we were so close to winning it.”

Two months after the Cup final Fletcher joined Crystal Palace in a £400,000 deal.

“I should never have left,” he says.

“I wasn’t playing loads and I’d come from Bournemouth, where if I wasn’t playing 50 games a season I didn’t know what I was doing.

“But I only went for the money, if I’m being honest. That was probably the biggest mistake of my career.

“But you can’t dwell on it. It’s just something you have to learn from.”

Does he ever look at today’s Premier League Cherries – or the upwardly mobile Welsh national team for whom he won 36 caps – and wish he was born into a later era?

The answer comes quick as a flash.

“I wouldn’t have got in,” he says. “One hundred per cent. I wouldn’t get into Bournemouth’s team, no way. The same with Wales.”

Fletcher ended his international career in 2009, aged 29 – he “could see into the future” and a team moulded around Gareth Bale, Aaron Ramsey and Joe Allen - and hung up his boots altogether three years later.

“I don’t miss playing at all,” he says, suddenly introspective. “Would it have been easier for me to play a little bit longer? Possibly.

“Would I have been scrapping around the lower leagues? Probably.

“Would that have been enjoyable? Probably not.”

Fletcher is one of life’s doers. Accordingly the “box-ticking” demanded by his current role “does my brain in”.

His enthusiasm for this latest phase of his fast-moving career is palpable, though, as he talks of presiding over a ‘no excuses’ culture, in which Cherries’ young hopefuls bear huge responsibility for their own development.

But does he harbour aspirations to put his neck on the block in the main job again?

“You go in and you graft, you put your heart and soul into it and then you lose three games and get the sack - you think ‘what’s the point’,” he says, before a rare moment of uncertainty.

“This is a great place to be. But who knows, who knows?”