Mark Hughes has had votes of confidence but QPR are next to bottom and four of their next six games are away from home. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP
Brian McDermott was invited to the pub last Wednesday for a drink withReading's owner, Anton Zingarevich, to lift his spirits; Mark Hughes has received his weekly vote of confidence from the Queens Park Rangers chairman, Tony Fernandes, and Nigel Adkins has just earned a stay of execution following face-to-face talks with Nicola Cortese, the executive chairman who calls the shots at Southampton. Welcome to life as a manager in the Premier League relegation zone.
Bets are still being taken on the first top-flight manager to lose his job but it would be a major surprise if the book remains open by the end of the month. Southampton, QPR and Reading have started the season so badly that they go into this weekend's fixtures knowing that they will remain in the relegation zone irrespective of whether they pick up a much-needed victory. This is the first time that two Premier League clubs (Reading and QPR) have failed to win any of their opening nine/10 matches and also the first time that the bottom three clubs have been four points or more adrift at this stage of the season.
On the face of it, Adkins's position appears the most precarious. Southampton have lost eight of their 10 league games and conceded 28 goals in the process. In the wake of Monday's 2-0 defeat at The Hawthorns, Adkins was honest enough to admit that he deserves to be the favourite in the sack race because of Southampton's position at the bottom of table. While the majority of fans remain behind him, the fact that Cortese felt compelled to meet with him on Tuesday is evidence that patience is wearing thin in the board room.
The former Scunthorpe manager radiates positivity and, in the eyes of many, deserves to be given a fair crack at the Premier League after picking Southampton up off the floor and leading the club to back-to-back promotions. The other side of the argument is that he should have delivered better results on the back of spending more than £30m in the summer.
Adkins believes there are mitigating circumstances for their bad run. "We've just played the eighth team in the division who have been in the top 10, I'm not sure how many teams who have been promoted actually get a run of fixtures like that," he said after losing at Albion. "I'm looking forward to the fixtures that we've got at home, which I've got to be positive about because we've been very good at St Mary's over the last couple of years."
Proof will be in the pudding. Southampton host Swansea on Saturday in what feels like a must-win game for Adkins. It is also the first of five home games in the next seven fixtures, with Newcastle United, currently 10th, the highest ranked opponents in that sequence. There is, in other words, the chance to turn things around, although Adkins needs to show he is capable of getting the balance right between attacking in numbers, which is central to his beliefs, and tightening up defensively.
Individual errors continue to undermine Southampton and, in doing so, raise questions about whether it was on oversight not to sign a couple of experienced Premier League defenders before the season started, rather than splurging £19m on Gastón Ramírez and Jay Rodriguez. At the moment, Saints need to score three times to have any chance of winning a game. "I will not hide away from the fact that the goals against tally is shocking," Adkins said.
While the Southampton manager is under no illusions that his position is in jeopardy, Hughes gives the impression that he feels almost bulletproof. There is a confidence bordering on arrogance that his position is safe no matter what and that it is a matter of time before QPR climb the table. Yet four of QPR's next six games are away from home, starting with Saturday's trip to Stoke, which was the scene of their last win on their travels, almost 12 months ago. The upcoming home fixtures, against Southampton, on Saturday week, and fourth-from-bottom Aston Villa, a fortnight later, will need to be won to prevent the jeers at Loftus Road turning into something more sinister for Hughes.
There was a huge turnover of players at QPR in the summer and it hard to escape the feeling there was little strategy behind some of the signings. Goals remain difficult to come by – only Sunderland have scored fewer – and Hughes is still searching for the right blend across midfield, where Fernandes admitted Reading "played us off the park initially" in the 1-1 draw at Loftus Road last Sunday. With so many high-profile names at the club and huge wages being paid, QPR's predicament has echoes of West Ham's struggle when they were under Icelandic ownership five years ago and survived on the final day.
Reading finished eighth that season, in their inaugural Premier League campaign, although McDermott is not blessed with a squad anything like as talented as the one that Steve Coppell won promotion with in 2006. The fact that leads have been squandered against Chelsea, Newcastle, Swansea, Fulham and QPR in the league, as well as Arsenal in that extraordinary League Cup game last week, provides a measure of how much harder Reading have found it to execute the gameplan that worked so well for them in the Championship, when they strangled the life out of opponents after going in front.
Life in the Premier League was always going to be much more challenging, yet Zingarevich, the club's Russian owner, was not exactly lavish when it came to coming up with the cash to strengthen. Only WBA spent less than Reading's outlay in the summer, which stood at about £5m, with many of the additions arriving on free transfers. There have been reports in Russia that Zingarevich is interested in signing Andrey Arshavin in January, which would be quite a coup, especially if he could have the same sort of impact at Reading that Jason Roberts did in the Championship in the second half of last season. That, however, is a big "if".
McDermott has been involved in football long enough to know that his future will, inevitably, come under the microscope unless results improve, starting with Saturday's home game against Norwich. He is a popular figure at Reading, where he has worked for the past 12 years, scouting and coaching with great success before stepping up to become manager in 2010, when the team were in a relegation battle. He took Reading into the Premier League against the odds, although Zingarevich was not at the club at the start of the journey and it remains to be seen how much slack he is willing to cut a manager who he inherited rather than appointed.
The dilemma for Zingarevich, Fernandes and Cortese is how long they should leave it before deciding whether to stick or twist. Wolves got it horribly wrong last season, when they sacked Mick McCarthy after the January transfer window had closed and without being sure that there was a replacement ready to step in. Blackburn, on the other hand, stubbornly stood by Steve Kean despite supporter protests and suffered relegation along with Wolves.
Sunderland, in contrast, were rewarded with an immediate improvement when they replaced Steve Bruce with Martin O'Neill 12 months ago while Fernandes will argue that his decision to get rid of Neil Warnock in January and bring in Hughes was vindicated, even if QPR only survived by the skin of their teeth.
These still feel like early days but the uncomfortable reality for McDermott, Adkins and Hughes is that football management at the highest level is a brutal business. The fact that a man by the name of Harry Redknapp is out of work hardly helps.
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