Ince’s problem is not his race or his resume. It’s relegation.

Paul Ince is not a victim of a vendetta against former Manchester United players, no more than he is under threat because he is black. One glance at the Barclays Premier League table will indicate why Ince and Blackburn Rovers may soon part company.

Any manager who reduced the club to that position would be in danger right now. Ray Harford went ten league matches without a win at Ewood Park, was knocked out of the League Cup by Stockport County and resigned in 1997. Roy Hodgson set the club on course for relegation in 1998-99 and was gone by Christmas. His successor, Brian Kidd, was fired less than a year later with the club nineteenth in the second tier.

This is a familiar story. Those managers did not have to be black, or red, to be fired; like Ince, they just had to be in trouble.

Football clubs are simple organisms. If Blackburn were top of the league, Ince could make Eric Cantona his assistant and end each victory by recreating Tommie Smith’s black-power salute from the 1968 Olympic Games and nobody would care. There is a bottom line in football, beneath it lie three teams and each has a manager with good reason to be nervous. If Tony Mowbray, at West Bromwich Albion, is not feeling the heat like Ince at the moment, it is only because his club are pretty much where they expected to be. The unexpected success of Phil Brown at Hull City is making life a little awkward, but nobody had West Brom down as anything more than relegation candidates from the start.

For Ince, it is different. In mitigation, he has frequently lost Roque Santa Cruz, a key player, through injury and the sale of David Bentley to Tottenham Hotspur was a blow, but, despite this, Blackburn seemed destined for mid-table mediocrity rather than a fight to the death. They were certainly not a team expected to go more than two months without a league win, not least because of the traditional difficulty for teams visiting Ewood Park in winter. Ince needs time, but that is a very comfortable stance to take when it is not your business that risks losing £30 million.

Blackburn are in an awkward position. No club wants to be the first to appoint a black English manager in the Premier League only to sack him five months later. Yet, logically, no club want to appoint any manager and dismiss him five months later. It is a sign of failure.

So, in an ideal world, Ince turns it around and makes a success of Blackburn, just as he did Macclesfield Town and Milton Keynes Dons. Yet, if not, it is patronising in the extreme to treat him as some special project or to argue that he should not be subject to the same scrutiny as his contemporaries. If he is not given enough time, it is not due to the colour of his skin; few managers get enough time these days.

Race is clouding the issue. Already it is being said that Ince has not had the same chance as young white managers, such as Tony Adams at Portsmouth. But if Adams were the manager of Blackburn and his team were in the bottom two approaching Christmas, he would be under the same pressure now.

There is no equality in demeaning Ince by adding invisible points for ethnicity. If he is to be appointed like a white guy, he has to be free to be sacked like one, too.