Hard not to feel for Xisco despite own role in Sheffield Wednesday mess

He was a little abrasive and spunky in how he went about press conferences - a little over-defensive in moments, perhaps - but it painted a picture of a man who had a bit of scrap about him.

With a then threadbare squad, no doubt inthe knowledge he’d be working to a relatively tight budget, employed in part thanks to promises of a bold shift in tactical direction; the feeling always was that he would need it.

The images beamed back from the Hawthorns on Tuesday evening, 90 days on from his table-bashing best, presented a man beaten-up by the job, a pale imitation of the confident Championship promotion-winner we were first introduced to.

He hasn’t helped himself - far, far from it. There’s been a slow and steady flip-flop from his own tactical mantra to all-out aerial assault that many would have been more comfortable starting with in the first place.

There’s been a core of players left out and in the case of Marvin Johnson, an absconding shrouded in public mystery that has left more questions than answers and leaves a left-sided player training in Dubai while the club that pays his wages so badly needs a left-sided player back home. His treatment has been severe enough to have invited PFA intervention.

On the pitch, Wednesday are lost, they keep losing and to this point could have been handled with much more clarity and direction. There’s no doubt that at the end of the day, it’s Xisco’s job to carry that out.

Despite all this, it’s difficult not to feel sorry for him. These blokes choose the football life and they understand the passion and hostility that comes with - while being handsomely compensated for the madness of course.

But another fact of the matter is that at the core of this sorry mess are human beings with young families.

He’s been asked on numerous occasions whether this is the job he thought he was walking into and while of course he can’t comment on such matters publicly, you rather suspect it isn’t.

The recruitment issues that played a part in Darren Moore’s exit seem to have been made clear and while he’s clearly driven so much of the club’s transfer activity since his arrival, he’d surely have fancied a bigger budget for a team arriving in a new league to bewildering whispers of play-off pushes.

The orchestra of chaos that has played out in the background from his first press conference to the nonsense of a statement from his boss that further turned up the heat on everyone involved.

A deal for a Premier League striker fell through late in the transfer window and his best two players are currently out injured. As the saying almost goes; when it rains, it persists it down.

It’s no revelatory claim to suggest this simply isn’t working and that the Spaniard’s methods simply are not getting a tune out of his players. Xisco’s Sheffield Wednesday are sleepwalking their way back into League One.

But as Dejphon Chansiri so excruciatingly pointed out at his unveiling, there are managers out there with stronger CVs and more experience.

You have to wonder how many of those managers would have Sheffield Wednesday sitting pretty under these circumstances - you wonder how many more may have been put off the idea of becoming his replacement.

Xisco has chosen so much of his failing path at S6, but there have been landmines under the paving stones.

For him to turn this around would be a miracle surpassing anything achieved in matches against Peterborough United.