The impossible job?
In the world of St Johnstone Football Club, the close-season task Steven MacLean was given, coupled with circumstances that subsequently conspired against him, took the title ‘first team manager’ as near to that description as you can get.
Never has a Perth head coach been less inclined to whine about his budget but been more entitled to bemoan it.
No doubt there will be a couple of his Premiership peers who would claim otherwise but MacLean has almost certainly operated with the smallest wages kitty in the league.
This has been the summer of cuts – it’s not the fault of new chief executive Stan Harris, and it’s not the fault of MacLean.
But, regardless of where the blame should sit for eye-watering financial losses, the facts are that Saints are seeking to claw back around £1.5 million.
If MacLean hasn’t already saved £1 million of that, he won’t be far off.
To put it into context, getting on for £500,000 was spent on transfer fees in the space of three previous windows.
Contrast that with MacLean knowing he wouldn’t have got close to matching the wages Kilmarnock could offer to safe-bet free agents like Matty Kennedy and Robbie Deas.
And the story isn’t just about the huge differences in spend between MacLean and his predecessors, as fundamental as that has been to the short management chapter just ended.
The recruitment infrastructure, or lack of it, that eventually wore Tommy Wright down meant Saints weren’t in a position to attack the market with homework done and attainable targets teed up.
League Cup horror show
The League Cup came and went with the squad alarmingly short in pretty much every area apart from goalkeeper.
Saints were effectively a month behind the rest and by the time they picked up the signing pace after the Premiership debacle in Dingwall, the depth of the rebuild needed and the funds available to see it through at that stage of the window were incompatible.
Into the mix you could justifiably throw a first team squad injury toll that peaked at 10, loss of form from previous dependables and player of the year contenders, and an over-estimation of the readiness of youngsters coming out of the academy.
On that latter point, Max Kucheriavyi apart (who has bounced back impressively from his own underwhelming start to the season), the best prospects simply aren’t quite ready yet.
MacLean made mistakes in team selection – the starting XI at Easter Road was one notable head-scratcher and Saturday’s at St Mirren another.
And his side was too passive in the game against Dundee. The last half-hour of the Livingston match was the same.
But MacLean teams have largely been sensibly set-up, tactically well-drilled and undone by lapses of concentration as opposed to structural failings.
That they have habitually started matches far better than they’ve finished them suggests training ground work is absorbed but adversity knocks the players off script.
It remains to be seen if the next man can sort that out or whether he will discover it’s endemic and irretrievable.
Centre-forward the central problem
He might also have a greater chance of his team scoring some goals with Chris Kane and/or Nicky Clark to call upon.
Being without a fully fit, link-the-play number nine for the entirety of his reign, is another huge reason Saints are bottom of the league, the last team in the country waiting for a win and now manager-less.
MacLean has done the financial work he was tasked with and he’s set out a long-term vision of the future that made absolute sense.
He also saved them from relegation, let’s not forget.
Plenty of managers leave with a worse legacy than that.
It could turn out to be work that has helped turn the ship around, of which successors can be grateful.
But an impossible job for a rookie boss over the last six months?
Yes, it could well have been.
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