Championship / Dan Fitch / 19 January 2010 /

We're only just into the new year and QPR have already sacked another manager. Dan 'The Betting Man' Fitch marvels at the madness of Flavio Briatore.

One of the great pleasures in football used to be the way we could laugh at the manner in which wacky foreign clubs were run, safe in the knowledge that nothing similar would ever occur on our own sane shores.

One of the funniest teams to laugh at was Atletico Madrid, due to the sheer madness of their controversial president Jesus Gil.

This was a man who celebrated Atletico's double by riding around Madrid atop an elephant and who claimed on live radio, that he wished that the plane carrying the Atletico players would "crash and kill the team", following a particularly insipid away performance.

Most of all, Gil was notorious for sacking coaches. In his 17 years in charge, he managed to get through 39 different managers. It's fair to say that he wasn't a patient man.

The nearest that we had to a Gil-figure in England was 'Deadly' Doug Ellis, but now at last it seems that we finally have an owner of a football club, who is prepared to be equally rash in his decision making.

Step forward QPR chairman Flavio Briatore, who in two-and-a-half years, has managed to get through six different managers. At 2.4 managers per annum, Briatore comfortably beats Gil's statistic of 2.29 and if he continues to give managers as little time as he afforded Paul Hart, he will soon be in a league of his own.

After Hart was rather harshly given the sack at Portsmouth, I was pleased that he'd got another high profile job so quickly. However, as is the case with a sexually promiscuous girl in a slasher movie, I didn't fancy his chances of survival.

Even a cynic like myself couldn't have predicted just how quickly Hart would be given the boot. Briatore gave him five games (of which only two were lost) before Hart left QPR by 'mutual consent'.

Rumours abounded that Hart was pushed after falling out with Adel Taarabt. Quite why the opinions of an on-loan youngster who never passes, hold any weight, is somewhat puzzling.

The hardest job at Loftus Road isn't being the manager but the bloke who has to screw the nameplates onto the manager's office door.

The longest serving manager of Briatore's reign was Luigi De Canio, who managed to hold onto his job for 35 games. Briatore proved to be equally trigger happy with Iain Dowie and Paulo Sousa. Jim Magilton also didn't last long, but to be fair, may have survived longer if he hadn't head-butted one of the players.

Still, Stoke's Tony Pulis was also involved in something similar around the same time and he wasn't sacked. They know the value of what they've got up at the Britannia Stadium.

It all looked so promising when Briatore, along with Bernie Ecclestone, bought up QPR. When the billionaire Lakshmi Mittal also invested, the papers were awash with the news that QPR were the richest club in the world.

Rather than splash the cash on star players, the owners looked to develop the squad more gradually. It seemed like a sensible approach, but it's been somewhat undercut by their attitude to managers.

Now Mick Harford has been named as 'caretaker manager', though in a world where the 'permanent' manager' is sacked after five games, then labels don't tend to mean much.

If Harford is given the time, then it's possible that QPR could still win promotion. They're just four points away from sixth place and can be backed at [11.0] to go up and at [2.22] to make the play-offs.

Let's hope that Harford is given a chance and that the bloke who screws on the nameplates, has a slightly less hectic 2010.

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