In an extraordinary development yesterday Crystal Palace put the midfielder Attilio Lombardo in temporary charge of team affairs at Selhurst Park, made Tomas Brolin his assistant and moved the manager Steve Coppell upstairs to director of football.

Coppell said: "It is a bold, massive step and a lot of people will look on it as foolish, but at least we are trying to be positive. It might not work but then everyone outside the club thinks we are going down anyway."

The obligatory interpreter sat beside Lombardo as the handover was taking place. "I had half an hour to make a decision and it felt like being run over by a lorry," the Italian said. He spoke in his native language but Coppell said Lombardo knows enough English to make himself understood.

Lombardo and Brolin, the Swedish international who had two unhappy seasons at Leeds, have 10 games in which to save Palace - bottom of the Premiership and seven points adrift of safety - from relegation.

Lombardo admitted he was "shocked" to have been offered the job. "I received a phone call last night, was summoned by the chairman-to-be Mark Goldberg and offered the job there and then.

"I am looking forward to the challenge but my intention is not to remain as player-manager. This is a temporary measure and hopefully we will have a new manager taking over so I can go back to being a player, even if Palace are relegated."

The Chelsea manager Gianluca Vialli revealed yesterday that Lombardo rang him for advice before accepting the Palace offer. Lombardo played alongside Vialli at Sampdoria and Juventus.

"Attilio rang me and said something very important had come up," said Vialli. "He is one of my best friends and we speak a lot."

Goldberg is still hoping to lure Terry Venables to Palace as manager and John Barnes is also in the running but the club's plight became desperate with Wednesday night's 6-2 hiding at Chelsea. That seventh successive defeat forced Coppell to hasten his own move upstairs.

Yesterday's events indicate that any progress with Venables is unlikely before the end of the season and Coppell said: "It's been like a slow strangulation where we have been drifting down the league. It was time for a change in view of the fact that my position would be changing and we had in our midst a man who has as much respect and achievement as anyone in the game."

Matters came to a head on Thursday when Coppell sought talks with Goldberg and the outgoing owner Ron Noades. As director of football, a role he also held 18 months ago, Coppell's first task was to ask Lombardo to step in.

The Italian and the Swede took yesterday's training session and Lombardo will choose the team to face Aston Villa today.

The £1 million transfer of Sasa Curcic from Aston Villa to Palace looks likely to go through on Monday.