ALAN ARCHIBALD breezes gently into the room, invigorated no doubt by an away day from the pressures of management spent on his ongoing pro licence course.

His continuing education on the SFA course is both a release and a pleasure. The Partick Thistle manager is eager to listen and to learn. His experience, though, suggests he could offer a more than interesting lecture on the realities of management: 2016.

Saturday, January 30 will see the third anniversary of Archibald’s elevation to the job at Firhill. He is the longest-serving manager in the top league and his tenure has been as calm and predictable as a Christmas episode of EastEnders. It has, similarly tested the onlooker’s power of belief. Archibald, at the relatively tender managerial age of 38, has been heartened by promotion, bruised by bad spells, sustained by survival in the top league and frustrated and fulfilled by forays in the transfer market. This is all relatively routine.

But the Thistle manager has also had to deal with a player testing positive for a recreational drug and another being found guilty of gambling on football. These issues have required skills that were once not normally required of a football manager. This is football of the modern age and Archibald, who played under what he describes as the “dictator” school of manager, is part of a new breed that is having to adapt to a football culture that changes so quickly it is as if a wean is playing with the remote control.

“The biggest change in me since I got the job is now I know things where before I only suspected them or believed they might be true,” he says. “I had to realise that players are different now than they were when I was playing. It has changed. Totally.”

Archibald was given his chance to manage Thistle on an interim basis when Jackie McNamara left for Dundee United. Three months later he was given the job on a rolling contract. When he stepped into the manager’s office, he was a player who was coaching the under-20 team but he was grateful for McNamara’s guiding hand. “I learned a lot from Jackie. He was approachable and talked to the players outside of the dressing room. I had played under the sort of dictator manager. Jackie was different. You could chap on Jackie’s door. You were not terrified, you did not walk by the manager’s office on tenterhooks. I learned from that. The door always has to be open.”

Away from the playing field he has faced two major, unforeseeable problems. Full-back Jordan McMillan was sacked in March after failing a drug test after a match against Celtic. Then two months later midfielder Steven Lawless was banned for six matches, four of them suspended until the end of this season, after being accused of betting on 513 matches between December 2012 and March 2015.

“Yes, we’ve had a few crises,” says Archibald. “With McMillan we did not quite know what was going on and we could not talk about what we did know, probably still can’t,” he says. He points out that the case had “huge personal ramifications” with the player being banned from football for two years but adds wryly: “You cannot help but think at the time: ‘I have lost one of my best guys, as a character and a player’. It was difficult to deal with all that and how it affected the group as well.

“The timing of the Lawless case was difficult too and you find as a manager that these things do not happen to players who are not in the team. It happens to those who are central to your plans, important to the team. You have not only to deal with the player but to deal with how it can affect the club. It tests everybody.”

Archibald is aware that he is working in a society that has undergone change. “You realise that right away from the under-age teams. Not everyone is from a house that has a mum and dad, not everyone is from a house that has no drink and drug problems.”

It has led him to being as much counsellor as coach. Players talk of how the manager will approach them and invite them to talk over a coffee. “You have to be able to relate to the players all the time,” he says.

“There are egos among all footballers. They are people with problems, like everyone else. I do not know what the egos must be like at the very top level but it can make it difficult to manage. It is all right when things are going well but when they are not they look to you for advice and guidance…on and off the field.”

The consultations continue at half-time. Archibald is a manager who believes in preparation. He watches DVDs of opponents after they have been scouted at least twice by his staff. Gerry Britton, head of the youth set-up and official Thistle legend, sits in the stand at matches and texts his thoughts to the manager at half-time. Archibald, too, involves his players.

“I still ask then at half-time: ‘Well, what do you think? Am I seeing the same game as you?’ I can get insights from that. If I see it totally different, then I will tell them. But I want to know what they are thinking.”

He has endured a difficult spell in each of the seasons in the top league but has been supported by a board that has, in Ian Maxwell, a managing director who has played professional football. The storms have passed, leaving Thistle safe in the harbour of the Premiership.

“We are more resilient now,” he says of his team but the description fits the manager too. “When we came up we were too bold, our full-backs were playing halfway up the park and we could get punished. We are smarter now.”

The acquisition of Abdul Osman has helped enormously as has the form of Stuart Bannigan. The latter seems certain to leave Firhill at the end of the season. Archibald is philosophical about the departure of players. Scott Fox, Conrad Balatoni, Kallum Higginbotham and Stephen O’Donnell left in the summer and Thistle seemed unable to cope in early matches but regained a stability that has led to them creeping away from danger.

But how was it in the early part of the season when results were depressing? “I was more relaxed about it than I would have been in previous seasons,” he says. “You are never pleased about bad results but we have had bad runs before and survived. This year the bad run came right at the start and that was the big difference. We felt it was just part of the new group settling in.”

Did he feel under pressure? “Yes, I put myself under pressure but the board and me have been through those sort of sticky spells before and we know we have survived.” This calmness in answer should not be confused with an attitude of relaxation in the face of defeat.

“I beat myself up. I don’t sleep. I think about it 24 hours a day,” he says of the aftermath of a loss. “You think about the next game all the time. If you have lost, you can over-analyse and you need to learn to let it go. It’s difficult, though.” He pauses before continuing. “I have learned a bit on how to handle it. I have become more adaptable to change as a manager and I am certainly more resilient than I was when I took over. Sometimes you can be too hard on your team and too hard on yourself. You have to find that balance.”

His equanimity is helped by his pots-match routine of spending Saturday night with his family of twin boys of 10 and a 14-year-old daughter. "The kids are a great release. In my first season, if I did not get a result, my Saturday night was ruined. The family would not come to you because I could not talk. But now it is different,” he says.

“I do not leave here after a game until about 7. I have media etc to do and I have a quick look over the game but I leave my analysis until the Sunday. I try to enjoy the Saturday night with the kids, enjoy those hours we have together, watch a bit of TV. ”

The TV schedule is of X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing. The melodrama of the long-running football soap is only just down the road, the next twist lying in wait for the veteran manager of all of three years.