A bad day for the good guy

SO now we know: nice guys don’t just finish last — sometimes they don’t get to finish at all.

When it comes to assessing the qualities of a successful football manager, it probably shouldn’t really matter that Chris Hughton is a nice guy but the fact that he is universally regarded as such only serves to make his sacking at Newcastle United seem all the more brutally unjust.

Not that we should confuse niceness with being soft. You don’t get to go mano a mano with Ruud Gullit in the European Championship finals without having proved your credentials in a thousand pitch battles. You don’t get to be Brian Kerr’s right-hand man in the Irish dug-out without being a figure of substance. And you sure as hell don’t get to survive a year and a half in the managerial ejector seat at St James’ Park unless you’re possessed of a keenly intelligent brain and a spine made of steel.