I feel a bit like Captain Renault this morning.

Following the death of the leader of the Nazi agents in Casablanca, Claude Rains, as Captain Renault, delivers the immortal line “Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects”. It’s the same thing when a managerial job becomes vacant.

What tends to happen, of course, is that people who fancy the job ring up their pet contact in the local or national press and make a comment about the job, so it gets published and their name connected with the position. Sometimes it’s even a denial of interest, which is equally effective in getting your name mentioned. The kind of posturing that does go on means that “new manager” markets are notoriously difficult to read and something that it’s normally foolish to bet on.

The other scenario, of course, is that both bookies and papers look at who is out of work at the moment, who has worked at that level and just throw their names into the ring themselves.

For what it’s worth, Ian Rush, Ian Atkins and David Platt all seemed to have been talking to their local press (Atkins, presumably, in case he doesn’t get the Torquay job) and John Aldridge has gone for the second option (the denial), while current bookies favourite Keith Curle probably falls into the second category.

Whatever the truth about the chances of any of these men getting the job and no matter how much fun it is for fans to speculate about names, this will be a vital decision for Jeff Bonser to get right. His record of appointing managers used to be reasonably good (Nicholl, Graydon, Lee and, to some extent, Hibbett, as against Sorensen) but the last two years have changed all of that and he has to get it right this time.