Half-time shouldn't be full-time for managers

"Suddenly," he remembers, "as I was prepared to shout something, I could not talk. It was as though someone had tipped a bucket of water over my head.

"The sweat was pouring off me, my arm ached and, in panic, I made for the door and shut it behind me. I could hear the lads saying, 'F***ing hell. I've never seen him like that.'"

Kinnear and Fry not only survived but have returned, revitalised and with the necessary medication.

Graeme Souness is another who has come back to football following serious heart problems.

The former Scotland international underwent a triple bypass operation in 1992 and now, when the stress level begins to rise, takes a few hours off, away from the Blackburn club he manages.

"I've been in football since I was 15 and it's a job I love. The best part is playing, of course, but now I'm doing the next best thing," he says.

"I would actually pay my employers - and I hope they're not listening - to do this job." "The next best thing", as Souness describes management, may be a clue. When you are still young enough to play you can dilute the stress by kicking lumps out of the opposition, as Souness did frequently.

When you are a manager, however, you can shout, throw cups, swear and curse but the sense of frustration often remains.

As West Ham manager, Harry Redknapp was sometimes so tense, so tight, that he was unable to reverse his car out of the driveway in the mornings.

Glenn Roeder may be suffering similar symptoms in the wake of that 7-1 defeat at Souness's Blackburn on Sunday.

Tommy Taylor, who left Leyton Orient on the same day that Trevor Francis parted company with Birmingham, blames the players. "I've said to the players that if someone else comes in, he'd ship most of them out because they're either too young, too small or not giving 100 per cent," he says.

Yes, stress has always been around wherever and whenever football has been played, but these days - particularly in the Premiership - a new strain of the debilitating condition has developed.

Jim Smith, another recent managerial casualty while at Derby, alluded to it recently when he said: "I've been in football for 30 years and every day, when I have gone in for training, the players have said, 'Morning boss.'

"It used to be that way but not any more. They're the bosses in football now, not me." Turning on the TV or switching on the radio doesn't help either as experts in studios or phone-in callers dissect and destroy. One such call accuses Roeder, in the wake of Sunday's defeat, of being unable to motivate his players?

Is he sure? Why extremely rich young men should need any motivating is beyond me, yet it is a fact that managers find it increasingly difficult to elicit an adequate response from players who are often earning far more than them.

Agents, too, have cranked up the stress levels in managers over recent years, cajoling, agitating, persuading, threatening.

Graham Taylor blamed agents as one of the reasons for his disillusionment with club management and another said he spent more time talking to players' agents than his wife. It is to be hoped that Houllier, like Kinnear, Souness and Fry, will eventually make a full recovery and perhaps return to football management.

The Liverpool manager will know that the job, like many others, has its moments of ecstatic enjoyment and bottomless depression.

The stress will still always be there, of course, and, as Kinnear adds: "There are other people worse off.

"I had the tap on the shoulder, but I was lucky. Thousands of people don't come through it.

"What saved me was the quick work of the doctor at Sheffield Wednesday.

"I was lucky. I had my heart attack at the right place - a football ground."