Team managers should time their holidays very carefully - fickle bosses have sharp knives and short memories, writes Johnny Watterson.
Odd the way executions are sanitised and formalised before the gurney is wired up or the noose is tightened. Completing the circle from signing on for a job to a dignified exit can sometimes take a thousand cuts and other times it is distilled into a moment. The booing at Lansdowne Road after the Republic of Ireland's defeat by Switzerland, or the photograph of a glowering Roy Keane departing from Saipan may yet come to symbolise Mick McCarthy's managerial career with Ireland.
McCarthy may be this autumn's hostage to fortune and the most recent addition to the yet to be written book on "Great Sporting Heroes Who Were Shafted", but he is part of an ever-growing team.
Ulster Unionist politician Enoch Powell came close to the truth when he said that "all political careers end in failure". He may as well have been talking about football managers and anyone else who can throw, kick or hit a ball.
Its greatness aside, the GAA can be particularly adept at eating its own and the prospect of slighting the county board by failing to reach heightened expectations can do untold harm to any managerial career. Eamon Coleman prospered throughout the 1993 season with the Derry footballers and landed Sam Maguire in the Bogside to much acclaim. The following season, Derry lost to Down in the first round of the All-Ireland Championship and Coleman's head rolled.
The manager was in the US at the time of the heave and at the All-Ireland lunch that year the then GAA president, Jack Boothman, noted with some dark humour that in the light of Coleman's sacking, the two county managers of that week's All-Ireland final, Pat O'Neil and Pete McGrath, should maybe reconsider going on holidays after the match.
John O'Mahony, the former Mayo football manager, also knows how it feels to be cut loose and then listen to homilies from those who enthusiastically hacked at the rope.
In 1989, he took Mayo to their first All-Ireland final in 38 years. Two years later, Mayo, with a new team, lost the Connacht final in a replay to Roscommon. There wasn't a bad word against O'Mahony but he shouldered the burden. They wouldn't let him pick his own selectors and out he went.
In 2001, Bohemians manager Roddy Collins, the brother of former World Boxing Organisation middleweight champion Steve, took what some thought were hard-earned summer holidays after his Dublin soccer team won the league and cup that season. The details released for public consumption were absurd. The club said Collins didn't turn up for work. Collins said he was on vacation. Either way, the successful manager walked before the shine on the trophies had dimmed.
Remember Bernhard Langer? Langer, currently looking out at us from giant billboards around the country urging us to take Christ into our lives, is the golfer whose faith was tested when he lost the Ryder Cup for Europe in 1991 after missing a short putt against Hale Irwin in Kiawah Island.
Had Langer holed the putt he would have won the match and tied the competition 14-14, meaning that Europe, as holders, would have retained the famous trophy. Instead they lost the match by a point. The German's miss will forever haunt him in the same way Paul McGinley shall be remembered as this year's Ryder Cup hero.
Moments cut both ways. McGinley's unlikely blow from around nine feet turned out to be the last of the competition because, with it, Europe had taken a lead that could not be bridged. He was chosen. Langer has held on to his belief but it is at McGinley's feet that golf fans light candles.
Fickle? Define sport by rules or emotions or both, but expect what you get. The laws of rugby are clear, the rules for despatching national managers not so.
Warren Gatland, the former Irish rugby chief, walked into a meeting with the Irish Rugby Football Union in January 2001. It went on for eight minutes, although how it lasted that long is hard to imagine. Like McCarthy, Gatland's reign came to an abrupt end with a bloody nose, this time at Scotland's hands. And, like McCarthy, Gatland's match statistics stacked up in his favour. Four wins in the championship, Ireland's biggest haul since 1948, and beating England in their only defeat in 15 matches appeared to work against the Kiwi coach.
In what the IRFU described as "the best interests of all concerned", Gatland, who had been in the job three-and-a-half years and marshalled 38 international games including a World Cup campaign, may even earn the "Golden Poker" award for the most royal shafting of all. Unlike McCarthy's lingering end played out in a speculative media, Gatland's shove was entirely unexpected.
It just goes to show that in sport, during the darkest moments, if they aren't up there on the building with you trying to talk you down from the ledge, it's very likely they are doing their Sunday best to push you off.