WE might be approaching the festive season but good will is sadly lacking on the managerial front.

Roy Keane has gone and Paul Ince is teetering on the brink. But we should not be at all surprised by the goings on up on Wearside and over Ewood Park way when even Rafa Benitez is getting flak on Merseyside.

Guiding Liverpool to the top of the Premiership in pursuit of their first league title for 29 years does not appear to be enough for some of the Anfiled faithful, considering the stick meted out to the manager in a question and answer session at a recent charity dinner.

It was embarrassing by all accounts as Rafa was quizzed on his signings – in particular Robbie Keane and the Brazilian Leiva Lucas – and on his so-called negative tactics.

Football fans can be a fickle bunch, but when your team is top of the pile and finally looking capable of getting their hands on the Premier League trophy, it’s hard to know what more they want from their manager.

Not that they have been short of success with the Spaniard at the helm: winning the Champions League and FA Cup is hardly failure. Yet individuals and the team are still being booed by their own fans. Incredible.

You can understand the managers’ roles at Sunderland and Blackburn coming under such intense scrunity. Relegation in the current financial climate would be football’s equivalent of Armageddon and while Ince feels managers are not given sufficient time to make an impression, you can’t blame club owners and chairmen for being spooked by the prospect of losing their place in the promised land.

These are times when even the strongest of characters are tested, and it’s no good Ince or Keane moaning about the pressures of management. They are both big lads with big personalities and they took their respective jobs knowing they were entering a precarious profession.

Some get a fairer deal than others but they should know not to expect sympathy when things don’t turn out the way they planned. And when you consider Blackburn have not won for 10 Premiership games and Sunderland had won just one in six before Keane walked, it stands to reason that they would be in the firing line.

It’s not a question of people being nice or nasty and it’s not, as Ince suggested last week, a case of being targeted by people jealous of their success as players at Manchester United.

It’s about being good enough to do the job, for which they are well paid. It’s about winning football matches and satisfying the demands of the people who employ them and the fans who support their teams. Critically, when you are not winning, it’s about coping with the attendant pressures and not buckling.

In the end, Keane quit because he felt he could not cope with a situation that was getting more uncomfortable by the day. But you can hardly feel sorry for a manager who spent £83million in 27 months and was given magnificent support from his chairman, Niall Quinn.

From a distance it would seem he no longer felt he could do the job to his own high standards, having apparently ignored the pleadings of Quinn and his solicitor and trusted adviser Michael Kennedy, who are reported to have pleaded with him to ride the storm.

Ince is likely to be next for the chop and he knows it, judging by his hysterical claim that “people are out to get us”. That smacked of paranoia and, regardless of whatever other qualifications he has, a persecution complex is a fatal flaw in any manager’s make-up.