HART BEAT
The Fiver has for some time been an advocate of the reverse-visualisation gambit, whereby openly tempting fate by saying out loud the worst possible thing that might happen means it somehow won't. For the Fiver, this means a daily routine of wandering around saying things like "no way could there ever be a beetle in my pocket", or "it would be probably be really awful to be routinely jeered and jostled by disdainful lesiure-suited youths outside Londis". Or "how unpleasant hypothetically speaking to find yourself jaded, frayed, smelling faintly of fish paste, all youthful vitality spent and increasingly prone to ranting in a way that seems angry and frightening rather than funny or in any way charming". Without which, the Fiver suspects all these things would have happened at least a bit more.
It seems that Paul Hart takes a similar approach, judging by his comments on taking the QPR job only last month. "I am here until the end of the season at the moment and I am happy with that," Hart said at his unveiling in December. "As far as a poisoned chalice is concerned, it has not been deep in my thoughts," he declared, lowering a chalice from his lips and coughing violently. "Some people have said that it is like going out of the frying pan into the fire," he added, struggling to free himself from a giant flaming wicker replica of a sad-looking, long-faced manager. "This is a great club and it is privilege to be working here."
And so it was until this morning when Hart left Loftus Road after just five games in charge, his second abrupt departure from a flailingly hopeless English league club in the last eight weeks, following his sacking by penniless Portsmouth. "The club would like to wish both [insert name of recently fired manager here] and [insert name of recently fired assistant manager here] good luck in the future and thank them for their hard work," droned the increasingly overworked template QPR use for announcing their managerial departures. Or at least something along those lines, the Fiver having nodded off counting up the recently departed bosses at a club which, since it got mixed up with swaggering blue-spectacled, disco-dancing, yacht-loiterer Flavio Briatore in November 2007, has been managed by John Gregory, Luigi De Canio, Iain Dowie, Paulo Sousa, Jim Magilton, Gareth Ainsworth, Steve Gallen, Marc Bircham, Hart and, now, his assistant Mick Harford.
Semi-retired miserabilist Alan Curbishley is already being bandied about as next in line. And has no doubt spent most of his afternoon pacing up and down talking about how awful it would be to have a blue-spectacled yacht-swaggerer rattling the letter box and peering through the keyhole and how maybe it's time to turn off the lights and close the curtains and keep very, very quiet.
