Signs not promising as Guv'nor's grip loosens

PREMIER LEAGUE:Paul Ince is a manager on the edge and it's only a matter of time before he falls, writes ANDREW FIFIELD

EVERYONE SEEMS to have at least one Paul Ince story: this, for what it's worth, is mine. About 10 years ago, Crystal Palace, locked in one of their familiar spirals down the Premier League, travelled to Liverpool for a league game. The match itself wasn't as one-sided as it could have been and afterwards, a few of the visitors traipsed to the players' bar to drown their sorrows.

Except they couldn't. When they arrived at the set of doors that leads to the bar at Anfield, they found a burly minder blocking their path. Entreaties to be let in proved futile.

"You can't come in here, boys," came the reply. "By order of the Guv'nor." The minder was, of course, Ince. The England midfielder had never had much time for Palace ever since seeing Eric Cantona banned for planting both his studs into the chest of an abusive fan at Selhurst Park in 1995, an incident which had also seen Ince questioned by the Metropolitan Police. Denying Palace's thirsty players a pint or two at Anfield was his way of exacting a little retribution.

At the time, it appeared little more than alpha-male posturing on Ince's part - a way for him to defiantly mark his territory without resorting to peeing all over the carpet and dry-humping a bar-stool.

But viewed through the prism of the last two weeks, when Ince's grip on his job as Blackburn manager has loosened with every paranoid outburst, it begins to look rather sinister - the first hair-line crack in his brittle state of mind.

Ince is not the first manager to harbour a persecution complex. Jose Mourinho saw spies and saboteurs in every darkened corner of Stamford Bridge and compiled more dossiers than M16 and the Stasi combined.

Alex Ferguson, meanwhile, is the master of the siege mentality. One of his Manchester United players could hack off an opponent's head using just his shin pad and Fergie would still dismiss the subsequent FA charge as a scandalous conspiracy.

But, crucially, the imagined enemies of Mourinho and Ferguson were rarely, if ever, just out to get them: they were adversaries of the club, darkly destructive agents which had to be resisted for the collective good.

Ince, however, has taken his travails at Blackburn personally. There are, he believes, unseen and unnamed forces organising a campaign to unseat him from his job, conveniently ignoring the fact that Blackburn are currently in the kind of form that makes supporters look wistfully at the window ledges of high buildings. Saturday's drubbing at Wigan was their sixth defeat in a row.

Ince needs to get a grip but the question is, can he summon the reserves of willpower needed to drag him through the first, and worst, crisis of his managerial career. The signs are not promising. There is nothing worse that amateur psychologists passing judgment on people they hardly know from behind the protective screen of a newspaper, but it is safe to assume that Ince, for all his bluster, is a rather insecure soul - and not just because he felt the need to personally bar a rival club from "his turf" at Anfield a decade ago.

As any Baldy, Lardo or Trigger will testify, nicknames choose you - not vice versa - and Ince's cringeworthy demand to be called the "Guv'nor" should have had the alarm bells clanging years ago.

As expressions of deep-seated sporting insecurities go, this can surely only be topped by one of Kevin Pietersen's former conquests claiming that the England cricket captain likes to hear his full name bellowed during sex.

But managers, and especially those in the Premier League, cannot afford these nervous flutterings: the pressure is too intense and the scrutiny too relentless.

When TV cameras now show every tell-tale bead of sweat in glorious high definition, and newspapers dispatch writers to grounds simply to chronicle erratic behaviour on the touchline, you need skin as thick as rhino-hide just to convince yourself you are not cracking up. And, on this season's evidence, Ince just doesn't have it.

This is a pity. Ince may have struggled to shake off the "Champagne Charlie" tag bestowed on him by Ferguson, but his willingness to start his managerial career in the gutter at Macclesfield and MK Dons, rather than the penthouse, was to his eternal credit.

There can also be no overstating the importance of a native black coach finally being handed a chance to shine in the top flight, and sacking him after six months would send a decidedly mixed message to those that hope to follow in his trailblazing footsteps.

But with the stakes so high, there can be no room for sentiment. Ince is a manager on the edge and, if and when he does fall, he might reflect on the irony of how the self-styled "Guv'nor" was, in the end, undone by self-doubt.