Following West Ham’s opening day tonking at the hands of newly promoted Sunderland, Karren Brady rocked up to TalkSport Towers for an interview on live radio the next morning. The club’s vice-chair spent the best part of an hour in the hot seat, during which time she extolled Graham Potter’s many virtues as both a man, a professional and a head coach who needed to be given time. Despite his extremely inauspicious eight-month reign at the London Stadium, he would be given every opportunity to get a tune out of an unbalanced, bang-average, make-do-and-mend assortment of players, many of whom are walking (or at a push slowly jogging) examples of the disastrous legacy of West Ham’s profligate erstwhile technical director, Tim Steidten. “West Ham is not a club that panics about its managers,” said Brady of a club that has just appointed its fourth new gaffer in 16 months. “We tend to support people, stick with them and see it through.”

While both Potter and his predecessor, Julen Lopetegui, could be forgiven for raising quizzical eyebrows at the baroness’s absurd claims about the West Ham hierarchy’s enduring patience, it is undeniable that neither man covered themselves in anything even...