Sacking a manager in October is not decisive. It is an admission.

There is a version of the early sacking that makes sense. A squad assembled for one idea, a manager committed to another, and a board that recognises the mismatch before it calcifies.

That is not what has happened this autumn. In three of the four cases, the manager was asked to work with a squad that had been shaped around a different set of principles, by people who then held him responsible for the gap.

Decisiveness is a word boards use about themselves. It rarely survives contact with the recruitment record.