Alan Biggs at Large: Wrong place, wrong time for all-change Xisco

No-one would have expected to write something like that just seven league matches into a managerial reign.

Or to add, in my personal view, that I’d have been surprised had the Owls boss survived another defeat in Tuesday’s 1-1 draw with joint-bottom Middlesbrough.

That result and performance, cheered at half-time and booed at the end, left the club in a sort of no-man’s land at a time when, quite understandably, many supporters are calling for change at every level.

Even the tennis ball protest against owner Dejphon Chansiri was half-hearted.

But, of course, nothing had to change as of the euphoric end of last season.

Nothing much at all.

It was a precious time and somehow Chansiri dropped the Ming vase.

He then marched through the splintered shards by making a questionable managerial appointment; eclipsing the new manager’s unveiling with an extraordinary outburst over the Darren Moore exit; then stirring it up again last week; and also presiding over the deeply disturbing Marvin Johnson affair.

Which doesn’t even take into account the chairman’s controversial ticket-pricing policy.

Allowing that he’s entitled to make all these decisions, because it’s his club, the reaction appears to have left him with only one place to deflect it – if the search for a first win continues.

But Munoz, for all his faults, is not the man most responsible for this crisis.

And, in a way, that leaves him even more exposed.

Wrong place, wrong time comes to mind.

As for the player interviews, that’s what they would say.

Who’s going to state the opposite?

And I’m not saying there is no sincerity because Xisco seems a likeable bloke to me; you’d want him to do well.

Not saying the players don’t share responsibility either, just that they look to me a confused bunch, lurching with changes of shape and personnel, from match to match.

Another big game beckons at Swansea on Saturday, potentially shaping the immediate course of the playing season – if not a club that needs radical reform rather more desperately.