Im going to give you some good advice, Brian Clough. No matter how good you think you are or how clever, no matter how many fancy new friends you make on the telly, the reality of footballing life is this: the chairman is the boss, then comes the directors, then the secretary, then the fans, then the players, and then finally, last of all, bottom of the heap, lowest of the low, come the one we can all do without the f**king manager! So said Derby chairman
Sam Longson in The Damned United. And really, thats it in a nutshell. Even forty years on from Longsons time, managers are still disposable, subject to abuse from the stands, the board and the dressing room and sacrificed for quick fixes. Nowhere is this more apparent than the moneyed playground of the Premier League, where managers drop like flies at the first hint of a crisis. All this begs the question how long could they possibly last? I know, the start of the new season seems a long way off, and it might seem a tad premature to take bets on whos going to be on the dole first. But now the dust has settled on the management situations around the top tier, now seems as good a time as ever to put our stake down early. Because one things for certain, they certainly wont all be here in 12 months time.