Brewster pays price for poor run

Lynch mobs for managers are a regular sight in the Scottish game.

Already this season Mark McGhee and Jimmy Calderwood have been casting nervous looks over their shoulders.

It's just that I thought it had all gone quiet and that the new found stiff upper lip may have saved the day for the troubled Inverness boss.

Although seven straight league defeats is the quicksand of security.

The rise and rise of Motherwell and Aberdeen after a start to the season in which they seemed to be running on syrup has taken a baseball bat to the baying mobs who wanted them strung up.

As it happens they are not alone.

Maybe only Billy Reid at Hamilton, Csaba Laszlo at Hearts and Dundee United's Craig Levein have been perfect little angels in the eyes of their fans.

I have heard abuse fired at twice-manager-of-the-month Gus MacPherson, back-to-back-to-back championships winner Gordon Strachan and of course Walter Smith who is not, apparently, delivering what arrogant Rangers fans think they deserve.

Mind you, if ever there was a bad week for the Rangers Trust to launch their campaign it had to be the one in which their team took six league points and closed the gap 'twixt them and Celtic to two points and progressed to the next round of the Scottish Cup.

I suspect they have spectacularly misjudged the mood of the huge majority of the Ibrox support. And, for that matter, their own importance.

But in any case the history of the game in this country is peppered with tales of boards of directors grovelling to the mob mentality and sacrificing coaches scandalously early in their careers.

Aberdeen, in particular, guillotined Willie Miller and Alex Smith before their time and Dundee United were trigger happy on a number of occasions, but specifically with Gordon Chisholm.

Consequently I welcomed the new sense of calm and serenity about the place.

Of course it has not all come about for the purest of reasons. Out of the darkness of the dire financial climate has come this enforced sanity, because they can't afford the pay-off for managers.

Sack the gaffer or keep him. It's Hobson's choice my friend.

Football supporters come complete with short fuses, never better illustrated than those who follow Motherwell and who bowed at the feet of Mark McGhee who dragged the club kicking and screaming to a European place last season.

But the leaves were hardly off the trees before you could hear the mumping of discontent from Lanarkshire.

The manager in turn asked if he was not due some loyalty given that he had produced that commodity when Hearts came calling for his services.
I suspect it was a question of the rhetorical variety.

And now his team have produced a re-awakening which has rumbled the entire SPL.

In a season of twists and turns Motherwell's thundering dismantling of Dundee United may actually have put them on the straight and narrow.

It has been a curious old term.

We fell flat on our red faces in Europe, but mortified as we are with embarrassment when we cross the Channel we have begun to enjoy ourselves in our own backyard.

There is a championship race worthy of the name again and in the push for Europe there is a crowded scene.

Eleven out of 12 SPL teams survive in the Homecoming Scottish Cup which means that somewhere down the line there will be some mighty clashes.

And of course two Co-operative Insurance Cup semi-finals are looming in which Falkirk and the aforementioned United will be desperate to eliminate the prospect of an Old Firm final.

That is mouth-watering, not matter how it slices.

But in fairness, Brewster has been a dead man walking for weeks.

I took no pleasure in tipping the Highland club as most likely for the drop before a ball was kicked and at this distance from the season's end they still look the most probable to fulfil my doom filled forecast.

I'm not quite sure of the root cause of this unusual glow of well being about our game.

Maybe it is the first shoots of snowdrops and daffodils that I spotted in my garden, or the generous measures of Islay Malt dispensed in my direction over the festive season.

Maybe I am just an all round good guy after all, or maybe it's the job security in which our managers now bathe.

Unless you are poor Craig Brewster of course.