Coming up short at Highfield

Noon, Thursday, The Sky Blue Lodge. Home of Coventry City on days that aren't game. The troops - as England's football journalists are known - are gathered in the cold. They are pessimistic. It is roughly 14 hours since Coventry's players dragged themselves off the pitch at Elland Road.

They lost again, for the fourth time in a row. It left Coventry stuck on 21 points, still in the bottom three. The manager, Gordon Strachan, is under increasing pressure. Coventry's next game is today, at home to Arsenal. Another defeat looms.

So does another match preview with the press. Difficult questions have to be asked. Strachan is a volatile character. On the ground is a heavy frost. The troops expect worse in the manager's office.

But we are wrong. On both counts. First, we are not in Strachan's office. Such has been the swoop around the growing drama at Highfield Road, we are ushered instead toward the Seminar Room. Second, Strachan is not frosty. He is not overly matey either, a ploy used by some managers in his position. He is just polite. Agreeable.

"Sorry," he says, as he hobbles in neatly dressed, freshly showered, "bit of cramp after running about out there". He's 44 next week. The atmosphere relaxes.

Gordon, it appears, is not, in Alex Ferguson's harsh words, "in one of his nippy sweetie moods". Nor, it seems, is Gordon, in Brian Clough's withering description, "coming out with some baffling gibberish" in one of his post-match interviews.

No, on this day, Gordon Strachan is calm and endearing. For those who know of him purely through his Match of the Day and touchline appearances, this will come as no surprise. Except then he is agitated and endearing. A bit like he was as a player.

Good runabout?

"Exorcise the demons," he replies smiling, "although I felt we were comfortable at all times last night. We weren't really under pressure except for a wee spell before they scored. I was saying to myself, `ah, things are changing for us'. Then the ball comes back in the box and there's an overhead kick." 1-0 to Leeds United.

The scorer was Robbie Keane. This time last year Keane was a Coventry player. He was the club's top scorer.

Thus, very quickly, we have reached the nub of Coventry's inadequacy this season: Scoring goals and players sold. Just 23 from 25 games this Premiership season, only Bradford have scored less. Only Bradford are below them. Keane and Gary McAllister have gone. They scored 23 last season.

Coventry's problem obvious?

"Yeah. Early in the season we weren't really making chances for the strikers and that might have set them off into a bit of a rut. Now we're making chances the strikers aren't really there."

As Strachan then pointed out, over the course of his four years and three months as Ron Atkinson's successor Coventry have actually had "some decent partnerships" prior to now. Noel Whelan and Dion Dublin, Dublin and Darren Huckerby, Huckerby and Keane, Keane and Cedric Roussel.

Today it is likely to be Keane's replacement Craig Bellamy (four goals), and Moustafa Hadji, a midfielder (three goals).

Tony Adams won't be quaking.

Whelan, Dublin, Huckerby, Keane and moved on for profit. Such is the reality at a club like Coventry. "Every time you get on a decent run people nick your players," Strachan said. Ultimately, he was phlegmatic about it. "It's just another lesson in life."

Back to reality. "The 18-yard box is the yardstick for this club right now. How we're perceived is dictated by how we perform in the last 18 yards of a football pitch. Having said that, our football is far, far better than three years ago.

"But it's like golf: Drive for show, putt for dough." Hence the interest in John Hartson, though that deal died again yesterday. Maybe they should sign Bob Charles.

The golf analogy was just one of several from Strachan's active imagination. Last week he had delighted the troops about a tale of going home to watch a western after the dismal defeat by Everton. Strachan had first switched on ceefax, football's new testament, but found it conducting a poll on whether he should be sacked.

He turned to ITV's version. They were running the same poll. So he turned on the western. As his wife entered the room he said to her: "If John Wayne's first words are `should Strachan go?' then that's it."

On Thursday he used another to illustrate the difficult situation caused by the ugly reaction to the home defeat by Everton. "A bit of both," was Strachan's response to a question about who should get who going first today, players or fans.

"There's one or two who sit there and need it to happen to be motivated, and I'm no different when I go to a pop concert and say `right, entertain me'. When you're at a pop concert you know there are people there just ready to go. It's a bit like that at football. Except I'm the opposite there, I'm one of the headbangers down the front."

What Strachan has to worry about are not headbangers who rant in the stands, but ones who whisper in the boardroom. He needs them to remember that he has been a success as a manager. In his three full seasons in charge Coventry have finished 11th, 15th and 14th. "Nowhere near relegation, not really even been dabbling with it."

Presumably his chairman, Bryan Richardson, did recall this when offering Strachan a new five-year contract. Now, however, it is said that while Richardson remains loyal and will not sack his manager - think of the compensation - he would not reject Strachan's resignation.

There seems little chance of that happening. Although Clough among others have noted Strachan's cranky demeanour in front of a television camera of late, Strachan does not think of himself as a failed manager just yet. Too much was also made of his recent admission to having self-doubt - "People started to think I was walking around like Woody Allen."

For Strachan, it has long been a symbol of his inner strength. From dragging his 5 ft 6 in frame up from the same Edinburgh housing estate as Irvine Welsh in the 1960s, to being rejected by Hibs, to being captain of Dundee at 19; from being an essential part of Ferguson's brilliance at Aberdeen, to winging it at Manchester United and then winning the league with Leeds aged 35, Strachan has admitted that concern about his abilities has stayed with him.

"How good a manager am I?" he asked in a newspaper column recently. Another 17 points, he thinks, and people will consider him very good.

But for a better answer, another Strachan analogy. "You do have a vision at the beginning of a season. But your vision can change. It's like binoculars. You're looking through them and you can see `there'. Then suddenly someone's turned my binoculars around and I can only see there. That's what it's like just now."