Bradford City v Barnsley: Long-serving Bantams boss Phil Parkinson looks for home comforts to sink in-form Tykes

With each passing season, the average length of a managerial tenure comes down as the demand for instant success means patience is thin on the ground and sackings plentiful.

Here in Yorkshire, this hiring and firing culture has led to eight of our 11 clubs making a change at the helm of their team inside the past 12 months.

Barnsley were one of those to appoint a new manager in 2015, Lee Johnson succeeding Danny Wilson in late February.

Later in the year, though, the Reds did admirably stick by their man when other clubs would surely have pulled the trigger during the truly awful run that brought eight straight defeats and an FA Cup humbling at non-League Altrincham. The reward for the Oakwell hierarchy has come via a four-game winning run – the most recent of which was a six-goal thumping of Rochdale – and the Reds being potentially just 90 minutes from Wembley in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy.

Tonight, the county’s longest-serving manager, Phil Parkinson, will try to halt that revival when Barnsley head to Bradford City but he hopes other clubs will now follow suit in showing patience to a manager when under intense pressure.

Having taken charge at Valley Parade in September 2011, Parkinson told The Yorkshire Post: “Everyone is looking for the short-term solution.

“A third of managers lose their job every year. But Barnsley stuck with Lee through a bad spell, probably as bad a spell as he is going to have. And now the players who were misfiring have come good.

“That is what happens through a course of a season and, as a manager, you have just got to try and make sure you have more ups than downs.

“It is an expensive business when you get rid of managers, particularly at the top level.

“It is also a huge gamble. Sometimes it pays off but sometimes it doesn’t.

“Just look at Cardiff and Fulham a couple of years ago. They did it and it cost them their Premier League status and it is very difficult to get that back.”

Last weekend saw Mark Robins and Ian Hendon sacked by Scunthorpe United and Leyton Orient respectively, the duo’s departure on January 18 taking the number of managerial departures in the top four divisions to 36 for the season.

This hectic pace of change is why Parkinson is the fifth longest-serving manager in the country. Arsene Wenger, now into his 20th season at Arsenal, boasts the longest reign and Parkinson believes the criticism that the Frenchman has faced during recent years is endemic of a big problem facing managers today.

“A couple of years ago Arsene Wenger was getting abuse at the train station,” said the 48-year-old, who led the Bantams to a stunning League Cup quarter-final victory over Wenger’s Gunners in 2012. “But I wonder if those fans are praising him now with Arsenal firmly in the title race.

“The phone-ins in the summer had people saying he wasn’t signing players and that he should have done. Now, though, everyone realises he was right but you don’t see people ringing up saying ‘well done Arsene’ about it.

“If that is what happens to a manager like Arsene, who has been there that many years and won that many trophies, it is going to happen lower down.

“Has it changed a great deal since I started in management (in 2003 at Colchester United)? I think the scrutiny on social media at the top end, which has filtered down, has definitely changed.”

As heartened as Parkinson has been to see a fellow manager bounce back from troubling times at Oakwell, he is determined to put a swift end to Barnsley’s four-game winning run tonight.

James Hanson is back in the squad after missing the last two games as City look to claim a win that could, depending on how Peterborough United fare and Sheffield United elsewhere, leave Parkinson’s men just two points adrift of the play-offs with a game in hand.

“You look at top teams like Burton, Walsall and Coventry dropping points and it is so tight,” said the Bantams chief when asked about the race for the play-offs. “We have just got to concentrate on what we have to do and not look too far ahead.

“We need to put in a performance where there are moments to lift our crowd. We want to get the stadium right behind the team again. We have probably lost our way with that in the last couple of games, for whatever reason.

“We need to make it a great place for our home players to play and a difficult one for the opposition, rather than the other way round.”

Last six games: Bradford City WLLDWDD, Barnsley LWWDWW.

Referee: S Hooper (Wiltshire).

Last time: Bradford City 1 Barnsley 2; October 13, 2015; Johnstone’s Paint Trophy.