Last thing we need is yet another Sky pundit

PREMIER LEAGUE:The latest statistics reveal that half of sacked first-time managers are never given the chance to work again

'TIS THE season for charitable appeals and football, never one to allow a passing bandwagon roll past unmolested, is also doing its bit for the needy.

True, sacked managers might not boast the cuteness of homeless kittens or the wow factor of African orphans, but they still need our help, damn it. There's only so far a six-figure pay-off can stretch, after all, so zap over to any of our rolling sports news channels and the chances are you will find another forgotten coach mewing helplessly into the camera, all soppy-eyes and oversized headphones, while a sombre voice-over intones that a manager is for life - or at least a four-year contract with company car privileges — and not just the hectic Christmas fixture schedule.

In the past fortnight alone, we've had Sam Allardyce, Alan Curbishley, Iain Dowie and Steve Cotterill all using their 15 minutes of air-time to make their case for a return to action.

Now it seems Soccer Saturdaycan hardly work through a tedious goal update from Preston versus Barnsley without some has-been boss telling any watching club owners that their batteries are recharged and, well Jeff, if someone comes along who matches their ambition then they would certainly have to consider it, after all there's a recession on isn't there?

There is, of course, something faintly absurd in seeing men who routinely blame the media and big-mouthed pundits for undermining their positions, trumpeting their credentials from the comfort of a TV studio.

Phil Thompson, the former Liverpool player and coach, is a particularly brazen hypocrite in this regard, having repeatedly sneered his way through press conference duties on Merseyside before clutching desperately for the Murdoch dollar as soon as he was shown the door at Anfield.

Then again, the modern manager has little choice but to use the mass media to tout himself to all and sundry. There has never been more coaches clogging up the professional game than now, with the latest statistics from Warwick University business school - the academic body charged with looking into these things - revealing that half of sacked first-time managers are never given the chance to work again.

Given that, last season alone, there were 48 managerial changes at all four levels of the national game, that's an awful lot of people searching for a dug-out to call home.

There has, to put it plainly, never been a worse time to be an out-of-work manager.

Old heads such as Allardyce and Curbishley might boast the sort of track records which saw both interviewed for the England job just over two years ago, but clubs who have been credit-crunched to the point of oblivion are in no position to pay them or their countless backroom staff the kind of salaries to which they are accustomed.

Until they either lower their expectations or wait for the financial storm to ease - a dangerous game, given the way reputations are forgotten as quickly as they are forged in football - they will stay stuck on the sofa.

Allardyce's curious mix of sports science and rank thuggery will not be much missed, and we can also do without the tedious Curbishley, a man with all the personality of a paperclip.

More worrying, though, is the way in which fresh-faced, bright and personable managers - Dowie, Adrian Boothroyd, Ian Holloway and Alan Pardew, to name just a few - have been casually tossed on to the scrapheap just a matter of months after being feted as the poster-boys for a new generation of super-coach.

Club chairmen, their minds befuddled by our oh-so-21st-century need for instant gratification, appear to have forgotten that young managers do not come ready-made: instead, they must be allowed to make mistakes in order to hone their burgeoning talents.

Everyone knows the tales of Manchester United sticking by Alex Ferguson, but Hull City's Phil Brown provides a more pertinent recent model: discarded by Derby after a matter of months in 2007, but given a second chance on Humberside - at the expense of another promising colleague, Phil Parkinson, admittedly - and now hailed as the saviour of modern English managers.

He isn't, of course, or not yet, at least. He will make mistakes as the weeks roll on, sign a few duffers and make the sort of substitutions which cause fans to choke on their hot dog. He may even preside over Hull's relegation, when they do finally fall from grace.

But to have lifted them this high in the first place, he must have something about him: a tactical canniness, an eye for a player and the potential to command unquestioning respect.

So when the time comes for Hull to sack Brown or back him to the hilt, they should buck the trend and show a little patience. If there's one thing Sky doesn't need, it's another pundit.