There have been some rumours flying about that possibly by the time you read this, PJ will have fallen on his sword and ended his reign at Pride Park.

These emanate from the Mail on Sunday, a publication that I hold in very little esteem.  When I was a kid, I used to read papers and sometimes relayed what I thought was exciting news to my father – his usual response was along the lines of a headshake and say: “papertalk.”  And so often he turned out to be right.

It looks very much like that it is indeed ‘papertalk’ as Pearson has rubbished the report.  I’m glad not because I like the man or anything like that, it is simply because I don’t believe for one moment that managers departing in the middle of the season effects any real improvement.  Redknapp is unusual in that he has brought about a transformation in Spurs – but generally any improvement tends to be short-lived or of little impact in the overall fortunes of clubs.  Research carried out in the UK and in the Netherlands both suggest that changing the manager actually worsens team performance.  Poor results tend to improve regardless of who is the manager (unless you are Derby County rooted to the bottom of the Premiership of course).

For what it’s worth, I think PJ is of a much higher calibre than the previous chap.  I’ve not been too happy with the meagre diet of football served up so far, but have always thought he needed time – at least until the end of the season.

Of course he has made mistakes but he strikes me as a likeable bloke who is transparent about what he knows he hasn’t got right.  For instance there was that story about him being asked about his biggest achievement and his response was the signing of Savage before laughing his head off.  Such openness and honesty might not endear him to the dressing room but if that story is true it shows that he knows he’s made a mistake and he’s not afraid to admit it.

Contrast that with Ferguson who manipulates the media at every stage to what he believes to his advantage – for example, if he thinks that there is a prima facie case against one of his players, he will come out and admit it.  But this will always be with an eye to ameliorating any future disciplinary process.  His handling of the Cantona affair at Palace was Machiavellian – the Frenchman in my opinion should have been banned for life but only served a relatively short term before being allowed back on the football field.

Ferguson also bleats about unfairness at every opportunity, especially where Real Madrid are concerned but he has been cited as a guilty party so many times when he has decided that he wants a player to come to Old Trafford.

Compared to him, PJ is a paragon of virtue and a relatively honest guy in what is an increasingly sleazy environment.  Football has never been very honest – there have always been underhand tactics, corrupt managers, bent refs, nutters who would break your leg and so on.  But it is difficult to get away from the fact that some of this cheating is getting worse with being so blatant and overt.  And there is collusion everywhere – I couldn’t believe what I was seeing on MoTD when Alan Shearer was saying he hoped Rooney would get off – a reference to a stamping.  Now for me, this is a deliberate attempt to hurt someone and if I did it, I’d be up before the beak facing a short prison sentence for GBH.

For all his faults, PJ comes out and says what he thinks.  He has had to deal with some very difficult circumstances – I believe that Stubbs’ retirement was a pivotal point from which it has been hard to recover.  He has had to dismantle a whole team, a task fraught with hazards aplenty, and renew a squad so lacking in self-belief and fight.  My view is that, this process is a long way off from being completed and the last thing we need is another upheaval.  We need time to settle down and re-build, not only the team but also the finances, the backroom management, and the global brand with feeder clubs.

Adam Pearson has been quoted by the DET as saying that there will be little activity in the January window.  As far as I’m concerned – I think that’s right.  The activity should be focused on clearing out the dead wood as much as possible with perhaps one or at most two arrivals.  Then we can concentrate the rest of the season on gelling into a team that plays some decent football, defends sensibly when called upon, and shows resilience when things don’t bounce our way.

A mass exodus of the backroom team at this stage of the season would be catastrophic - new people coming in with their ideas of how to run training sessions, new routines, new tactics etc. Pearson knows that – hence his emphatic denial of the MoS scaremongering tactics.

The management board just need to keep working away behind the scenes and I’m confident that eventually we will start to see a more positive and vibrant team.  There have been few signs of this, but we are not yet into the second half of the season and so, patience is the order of the day, however hard that may be.

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