THE MESSAGE TO BOARDROOMS IS loud and clear: if you want to stop the rot, replace your manager with a caretaker. Leicester City, Newcastle United, Queens Park Rangers and Hartlepool United are managed by men who are living on borrowed time, but all four teams won at the weekend and Rob Kelly, Glenn Roeder, Gary Waddock and Paul Stephenson have yet to lose a league match while in temporary charge of their respective teams.
Leicester had lost their previous six Championship matches and were drifting towards League One before Craig Levein was dismissed three weeks ago and Kelly was put in temporary charge at the Walkers Stadium. Three wins in three league matches later and it is easy to see why Patrick McCarthy, the Leicester captain and the scorer of the first goal at the Withdean Stadium on Saturday, wants Kelly to be made his club’s next full-time manager.
“Everybody is enjoying working with Rob at the moment and he has proved that he is the man for job,” McCarthy said. “He has made us hard to beat and hard to break down. He has got us organised and he has steadied the ship. Everybody is pulling in the same direction.”
Two Leicester goals in the first five minutes of this crucial match between teams fighting for survival in the Championship were enough to increase the gap between the teams to six points and leave Brighton & Hove Albion five points away from the potential safety of 21st place.
McCarthy reacted smartly to a corner taken by Joey Gudjonsson to give his team the lead with a close-range volley in the fourth minute and Iain Hume doubled the advantage soon after by sprinting clear of Guy Butters and rounding Wayne Henderson before rolling the ball into an empty net.
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Alexandre Frutos took advantage of a weak punch by Rab Douglas to bring Brighton back into the game after the interval, but the eagerly awaited grandstand finish failed to materialise.
“The one thing we can take out of the game is that our heads never went down,” Mark McGhee, the Brighton manager, said. “The first five minutes were disappointing, but we have plenty of heart for the fight. We are in a scrap and we know that we are in a scrap, but we are up for it.”