News that Cardiff City fired their manager Malky Mackay yesterday after their 3-0 home defeat by Southampton was not totally surprising, but sad nonetheless.

That takes the total of managers leaving Premier League clubs since the start of the season to six, almost one third of the managers in the top division in England. Three of the managers have been fired in the past couple of weeks, with Tottenham and West Brom recently firing their head coaches, Andre Villas-Boas and Steve Clarke. Of the six clubs who have changed managers, five are in the bottom six in the table, with my club, West Ham, the only club showing faith with their manager. But for how long?

Second from bottom, West Ham manager Sam Allardyce will be under more pressure today to get a result at home against West Brom.

As I have said before, football management is a tough business, made even more difficult because there is so much at stake. Financial rewards are great, not just for those clubs qualifying for the Champions League, but just holding on to a place in the Premier League can be a huge financial boost for a club. It’s crazy money, I call it, with top players earning up to £250,000 a week.

What you have to bear in mind is a lot of people who own football clubs in England today are not even English and they have a different way of doing their business. Coaches know that if you don’t produce, you are not going to be in the job very long — and I’m sure most of them understand that. It’s sad, but that’s the nature of the beast.

Smart coaches make sure they have a clause in their contract that says, “If you sack me then I have to be paid up for the remainder of my contract.”

When you have clubs who just get promoted, people start looking for instant results but that isn’t often the case because there is sometimes a big difference between the players who play in the Championship and those in the Premier League. That’s what some of the clubs who have gained promotion over the years are finding out.

We’re having that problem right now at West Ham, where some of our players are not of the same quality as other players in the division. I would think Sam’s job will be under threat if they continue to languish in the relegation zone. It’s all about results, regardless what people say. He is probably lucky that he has two English guys who own the club and are a bit more tolerant. As a manager, you want success but it depends on what hand you have been dealt.

Tim Sherwood was this week appointed the new Tottenham manager on an 18-month contract and he will be under scrutiny right away because Spurs have high expectations after spending so heavily in the transfer market in the wake of the lucrative sale of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid. The Tottenham chairman, Daniel Levy, is just a different human being. He is a bit like Frank Sinatra: he does it his way.

I think the Spurs sacking was probably the hardest, but when you spend about £100 million on new players, you have to have some success, even though I understand some of those signings were not the head coach’s choices. One player who has quickly come back into the frame at Tottenham is striker Emmanuel Adebayor, who was left on the sidelines by Villas-Boas and promptly scored three goals in his first two starts under Sherwood. I like Adebayor; he has quality and scores goals.

Lots of times, players can cause a manager to get fired by not playing to their potential and if affects the manager. All the manager can do is give you instructions to go out on the field and produce; the rest is up to the players. And then if you have a manager who doesn’t have a say on what players come in and the owner or chairman interferes in that, then he won’t have a dog’s prayer and will end up in big trouble.

The season reaches the halfway stage this weekend, with interesting races developing at the top and bottom ends of the Premier League table, where three points separate the top four teams and four points separate the bottom six clubs. It’s going to be a dogfight at both ends of the table.

I said from the beginning that Manchester City, when you look at their depth, have that little advantage. And you can’t count Manchester United out, either, even though they have some ground to make up. They went two goals down to Hull on Boxing Day and fought like hell to get back into the game and ended up winning 3-2. That’s what champions are made of, whereas my team went ahead against Arsenal and then missed two golden opportunities before Arsenal came back and buried us 3-1.

We have to win against West Brom, but the injured Andy Carroll is still a big miss for us up front. The teams down there near the bottom have to start getting results fast.