Opinion as to whether the New Year should see a new man at the helm is divided, but those who think Coleman should stay seem to be heavily reliant on one argument – stability.

“We keep changing the manager and never seem to improve so it just doesn’t work. Stability brings success – look at clubs like Man United, Arsenal and Liverpool” comes the cry. Trouble is it’s isn’t the stability that brought those clubs their success; it was success that brought the stability.

Rafa Benitez took over Liverpool in 2004 and won the Champions League in his first season and the FA Cup in his second. After five years they currently find themselves mid-table and out of the Champions League at the first hurdle, despite him being given a small fortune to spend on players. This is stability but it’s hardly making them more successful.

Similarly Arsene Wenger took the reins at Arsenal in 1996 and won the double in his second season, followed by nothing for the next three seasons. A flurry of league and cups followed but the cabinet has been bare since 2005. Thirteen years in and although still undoubtedly a good team, they’ve fallen behind Chelsea and Man United in terms of consistency and so aren’t quite the force they were in Wenger’s early days. Stability hasn’t really brought them greater long-term success either then.

Even the mighty Alex Ferguson relied on an FA Cup win three years into his reign to placate unhappy supporters and board members in order to keep his job and allow the stability of the last twenty years.

Obviously these teams have much higher expectations thanCity, but had these expectations not been met, or even gone backwards as it could be argued City have, would they have been given time purely for the sake of ‘stability’? Somehow I doubt it.

Although a few City fans still have their heads in the clouds about Coventry being a Premiership team, most have accepted the fact that we’re an average Championship side and adjusted their expectations accordingly. I think a mid-table finish would have been acceptable to most fans this year along with signs that the squad and the way we play were slowly but steadily improving, but even those mediocre ambitions have barely been met.

I could understand the calls for stability if we were getting through managers like QPR, but City managers are getting time, if not necessarily all the resources they want, to mould their own teams and by the time they’ve left the players in that team are pretty much ones they’ve chosen themselves, even if they weren’t their first choices. Therefore any failings at that point have to be placed at the managers door: - either they’ve used the funds they have been given poorly, are unable to coach the players to a sufficient standard or are being outclassed by other managers tactically and/or in terms of motivation.

So it may well be that changing the manager all the time hasn’t brought us success, but it may well have stopped us failing even more catastrophically. Towards the end of Adams’, McAllister’s and Dowie’s reigns we looked like a team going south before changes were made. Ultimately we’ll never know if those managers would have taken us down, but one thing is certain – we definitely didn’t with a new man at the helm.

Another thing is certain – Gordon Strachan is Coventry’s longest serving manager in the past 25 years. Who’s also the only manager in that time to preside over relegation?

No-one wants to see Coventry City changing manager all the time – it’s disruptive to the team and costs a fortune in paying a manager off, hiring a new one as well as in transfers to allow the new man to get his own team. But the stability argument is a get-out clause for those who don’t want change but can’t find a tangible reason to support their position. When considering Coleman’s future let’s look at the things which can be analysed – results, the standard and style of football, the body language and effort of the players – rather than some theory based on the notion that change is bad.

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