Andrew Fifield On The Premiership: It is a reliable rule that there are generally two Premiership clubs in crisis at any one time, and that one of them is always Newcastle United.

There is something about the city and the football club which dominates its skyline which makes them natural settings for pandemonium, as anyone who has ever walked through the Bigg Market on a Friday night can confirm, but in Glenn Roeder they have a man who is ideally suited to negotiating the Tyne's perennially choppy waters.

All managers view their jobs as endurance tests, but Roeder's road has been particularly rocky.

He will always be remembered as the man who somehow led a West Ham United squad studded with some of the brightest prospects in English football into the Championship in 2003, although by the time demotion was confirmed, the manager was convalescing from a brain tumour.

He returned to full health at the start of the following season, just in time to be sacked.

It would be enough to embitter even the most virtuous of souls, but Roeder's traumas have given him that most precious commodity in the self-absorbed world of professional football: perspective.

"When I was at West Ham, I had the wrong idea that I should take criticism personally," he said. "But afterwards I realised that it wasn't me that was being attacked so much as the job itself. It could have been anyone in that position and they would have been getting the same treatment. That realisation has helped me enormously."

Roeder was in a particularly magnanimous mood, having just seen an unusually resilient Newcastle swipe a point from Arsenal.

Yet his comments should be required reading for any manager who fears they are buckling under the strains of this most scrutinised of professions, and this season more than ever.

This is a watershed campaign for Premiership clubs. Next year, the new television contract takes effect, yielding a 50 per cent increase in broadcasting revenues. There has never been a better - in other words, more lucrative - time to play top flight football in England; conversely, relegation has never been more costly.

Raising the financial stakes to such vertiginous heights has serious implications, not for players - who, provided they are not guilty of some horrendous act of professional misconduct, are almost guaranteed lucrative employment at some level - but for the men who lead them. They are the ones who assume responsibility for safeguarding their clubs' Premiership status and it is they who pay the ultimate price in the event of failure.

Furthermore, for managers there is no easy way back. Six Premiership bosses - Alain Perrin, David O'Leary, Steve McClaren, Graeme Souness, Alan Curbishley and Mick McCarthy - lost their jobs last season, either through choice or by force, and none have since found employment at another elite club. Chairmen used to pick their coaches from a merry-go-round but that seems to have been replaced by a one-in, one-out system and - as we all know - if your name is not on the list, you are not getting in.

Perhaps the greatest surprise of this most seismic of seasons is that only one manager has so far been tossed onto the street, although it is instructive that the victim was Charlton's Iain Dowie.

The south Londoners used to be a by-word for stability - an oasis of calm in the Premiership's general tumult. Curbishley was the manager - he had always been the manager, just as Jack Torrance has always been the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel - and every year he would lead them safely through the vast expanse of mid-table savannah land. It was safe, steady stuff - a little dull, perhaps, but few Charlton fans were complaining.

Then, in the dog-days of June, the club lost their heads. Curbishley departed, Dowie was plucked from near-neighbours Crystal Palace amid much acrimony and the new manager was permitted to spend not just this season's transfer budget in a single summer, but next year's as well. When their first 12 league games yielded just eight points, a panicky board had no hesitation in pulling the trigger.

Dowie has now become a reluctant symbol of modern football's boom and bust mentality. The Ulsterman was considered one of the brightest, most innovative and inspirational managers when he hoisted Palace into the Premiership by their boot-straps in 2004 and his appointment at the Valley was generally held to be a wise one.

Not any more. It took three months and eight defeats to shred that reputation, and Dowie can now only dream of landing another high-profile post: indeed, one newspaper was linking him with a move to Luton yesterday. Maybe Dowie should steer clear of the sports pages for the next few weeks and stick to Roeder's invaluable self-help manual for managers in distress.