There have been four Scottish football managers - Malky Mackay, Owen Coyle, Steven Pressley and Billy Davies - who have all been lauded at different stages in England in recent years.

Three of them today are out of work, and Owen Coyle has only found employment by escaping the closed avenues of British football to find solace in the USA.

Football management remains as fragile a gig as ever. One moment you are coasting - being garlanded even - and the next you are being handed your P45. Right now the Scots are proving this truth as well as anyone.

Mackay, sacked by a sinking Wigan after 138 days in charge on Monday evening, is a particularly resonant case. His fall from grace has been astonishing.

It is less than 20 months since this former Celtic defender was being feted in English football. Having transformed Watford, Mackay then repeated the trick at Cardiff City, and was worshipped by supporters, before private disgrace and political infighting brought him down.

It is not my intent here to go back through Mackay's offensive texting about ethnic minorities and other issues. As much as many of us can be a bit politically incorrect and "off-colour" in private, these sentiments were still pretty disgusting when they came to light.

When you add Mackay's feuding with Vincent Tan, the Cardiff owner, then the seeds of his destruction were sown. At Wigan he was handed a second chance by Dave Whelan, but Mackay's failing this time has been an old-fashioned football one.

Now where for him to go? Malky Mackay, the great new hope of British managers not so long ago, is in danger of being washed up at 43.

If he wants comfort, he could speak to Owen Coyle about it all. Before Mackay emerged, Coyle was the man being presented by some as the next Alex Ferguson, after restoring Burnley and taking them by some minor miracle up into the Barclays Premier League.

That was in 2009, at a time of florescent newspaper pieces about the meteoric rise in Coyle's career. But by December 2012 he was near done in England, sacked by both Bolton and Wigan, and suddenly out of work and unwanted.

Coyle was unemployed for a whole year in 2014 before escaping to America to coach Houston Dynamo. That could prove a lucrative and enhancing experience, but let's not be kidded: Coyle would rather be in England's Premier League had his series of boats not been burnt in unexpected fashion.

Billy Davies in turn was the great new light before Coyle. Snowed under with manager of the month awards in his time with Derby and Nottingham Forest, he too seemed to be in inexorable rise at one stage.

But Davies has now been out of work for three of the last four years and his ticket is distinctly cool. Even Rangers, who appeared to need a coaching-manager very much in the Davies mould, have been reserved towards him. Davies must wonder what he ever did wrong.

A lesser case is Steven Pressley, though his recent fate at Coventry City fits with a trend in managerial implosion.

Following Pressley's acceptance of the Coventry job in March 2013 he was a popular figure in the Midlands and, like Coyle and Davies before him, was viewed as the coming man.

Coventry were homeless and mired in insolvency - and docked points - in the Sky Bet League One but Pressley's drive and success at the club saw Coventry fight off suitors for their manager and tie him down to a new, enhanced contract in September 2014.

Just five months later - on February 23 2015 following a run of poor results - Pressley was sacked. He has joined the queue of recently-feted, now out of work managers.

In all of this I am minded of Alex McLeish's words to me. "You never know when it is going to turn," McLeish told me last year. "You feel everything is right, progress is being made, and then suddenly…crash."

After stints himself at Birmingham City, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest in England, McLeish also found English pathways blocked, and headed off to Belgium and a just-as-fraught experience at Genk.

On and on this saga goes. In football management, talent and hard work do not seem to be enough.

You also appear to need a magical ability to swerve the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.