Lincoln City head coach Chris Cohen admits it is difficult to see a fellow manager lose their job, after the Imps twice became the catalyst for Championship dismissals.
Earlier in the season, Paul Heckingbottom was sacked by Preston North End after losing 1-0 to the Imps. More recently, it was Nicky Hayen who paid the price of losing against Lincoln. Our 4-1 victory proved to be his final game in charge, and he was fired before the team bus had even got back to Turf Moor.
One of Hayen’s final acts was to speak to Chris and Tom Shaw after not shaking their hands pitchside after the defeat. He left before the formalities were completed, and went to them after the press conference to apologise for disappearing down the tunnel. An hour later, he was unemployed.
Chris agreed it was a difficult aspect of the job, having been in that position himself. He exited Stoke City along with Steven Schumacher after losing against Des Buckingham’s Oxford United. Having felt that pain, he empathises with managers who have lost their job at our hands this season.
“Yes, it’s really difficult,” he said in today’s press conference.
“I’ve been in that position as an assistant myself before. With the amount of noise around the football club, Nicky would probably have known there was a possibility it could happen if results didn’t turn.”
Hayen was under increasing pressure at Turf Moor, and never got a fair crack of the whip. Burnley’s squad is horribly unbalanced; he came in late over the summer and didn’t get a big pre-season, and they had 15 players injured for the trip to Sincil Bank. On top of that, big personalities in the squad didn’t seem to gel with him, and that made a hard job even harder.
“It’s just never nice,” added Chris. “Being in this position even more so, but just being in football in general, it’s a really hard job to do.
“You see good people doing their utmost to get a team into a position to help the football club progress, and when it doesn’t happen, it’s always about when the people above you make that decision.”
Since that decision, Burnley have appointed Fabio Celestini, the former CSKA Moscow boss. That might not be the last managerial change the Imps are a catalyst for: Watford are up on Tuesday, and they sack managers more often than I wash my feet, while Phil Parkinson at Wrexham is also under pressure, and they visit the Bank the first week back from the international break.
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