Last time around the team was joint top of the league and vying for promotion when the Dens Park board decided time was up for their manager. This time the tap on the shoulder came a month and two days after the man in charge had received the Ladbrokes Premiership Manager of the Month Award. Yet in both instances there was a sense of inevitability.

In February 2014 it was a very strange experience to attend ‘Bomber’ Brown’s last post-match press conference when he gave what almost amounted to a resignation speech in defending the right of supporters to lambast him following the draw with Alloa that had allowed Falkirk to draw level with Dundee at the top of the Championship. There was, though, a sense that the 52-year-old, whose appointment had been highly unpopular with a large section of the club’s support, felt he was running out of ways of motivating his team.

Paul Hartley, by contrast, offered his board no such ammunition and it was only after he had taken the team through a training session on a public holiday that he returned to Dens to be told his services were no longer required.

Read more: Alan Stubbs frontrunner to take over at relegation-threatened Dundee after Paul Hartley pays the price for dire run

It has been a staggering fall from grace for a man who steered teams to successive promotions in his first three seasons as a manager and, has given his club’s support some heady moments since. A top six finish in his second season was followed by last season’s ‘doon derby’ as, in slightly unsavoury fashion, the celebrated relegating city neighbours United. Most recently came those award winning successes, a first home win against Rangers for a quarter of a century, immediately followed by rattling in five goals during in an electrifying first half at Motherwell.

As they moved into the top half of the table with two thirds of their matches played the ensuing run of seven successive defeats that has taken them into the relegation play-off slot, was hard to envisage which may have been the issue. At least some of his squad may have relaxed mentally following those February wins and even before he received that award in the ides of March, the warning signs were there with limp performances against Partick Thistle and St Johnstone killing their momentum.

It has been a demonstration of how quickly things can change in football albeit the more reasonable will feel Hartley had earned the right to be given the chance, in the last five matches, to turn things back the other way.

This is, after all, the manager who made such an impression operating in what is considered south of the border to be the footballing backwater of Scotland’s lower leagues that, early in his time at Dens, he was offered the chance to head to the English Championship with Cardiff City. His judicious reasoning, when explaining afterwards that he had been concerned about whether the Welsh club’s controversial owners would let him do things his way, reinforced the impression of a sensible, grounded approach to his work.

Read more: Alan Stubbs frontrunner to take over at relegation-threatened Dundee after Paul Hartley pays the price for dire run

Since he also said at that point that his thinking was influenced by a determination to ‘build Dundee FC and make it successful,’ such loyalty should surely have carried some weight with the club’s board when, for the first time in Hartley’s management career, he faced a crisis.

Doubtless the directors took the view that they had seen enough to persuade them that the missing component in his CV was evidence of how to deal with a relegation battle, but there seemed genuine regret in the statement they issued which included managing director John Nelms’ observation that: “I think somebody in the near future is going to get a good hard working manager.”

The respect conveyed was wholly deserved because Hartley fully justified his appointment with the team he built, most notably in demonstrating his eye for a player when giving Kane Hemmings and Greg Stewart the opportunities to shine as Dundee became arguably the best team in the Premiership to watch, other than Celtic.

After they were sold on hoping he could keep finding such bargains with Dundee’s budget was surely expecting too much and in some ways it is surprising that in reverting to the next best group of players Hartley could afford to assemble, they were as competitive as they have been for most of this season.

Read more: Alan Stubbs frontrunner to take over at relegation-threatened Dundee after Paul Hartley pays the price for dire run

Still only 40 he meanwhile leaves behind a club that has made umpteen managerial blunders dating back close to half a century since the failure to offer Jim McLean the job, when they instead allowed him to leave their coaching staff and turn their rivals into the city’s dominant football force.

With the prospect of another cut-throat derby encounter now very much among the options in terms of how this season will end, then, history will again be the ultimate judge of a decision Hartley himself seemed to accept as harsh but understandable, if not necessarily entirely fair.