The Premiership: And the award for Middle Manager of the Year will go to...

They won’t lift the league trophy, but they deserve to win the very highest praise. Chris McGrath hails the heroes on the sidelines

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No crock of gold at the end of the rainbow? Well, the fact is that if Manchester City beat Tottenham today they go top of the league.

Which just goes to show the dividends you can achieve, if only you have the patience to build a team over many seconds and minutes.

Should they happen to lose, mind you, they will be deep in relegation trouble. And if they are still in the bottom three at tea-time, when the 3pm kick-offs are in, then I’m afraid that cat with the scarf will have to go.

These first skirmishes, of course, can be notoriously misleading. Curiously enough, last year the team that had finished fourth likewise began the new campaign against the one that finished fifth. After Arsenal beat Everton 6-1 at Goodison Park, the unanimous conclusion was that the young guns could finally deliver the title. Plus ça change.

As it happens, the first table of the Championship season last Saturday was not quite so meaningless. Clearly, it may look very different by May. But the fact that not one match was drawn identified a league in which every single team can play any other team, and legitimately aspire to three points. In the Championship betting, only two clubs are dismissed at 100-1. In the Premier League market, all bar six clubs are between 150-1 and 10,000-1.

At least the elite stratum within the Premier League is not quite as petrified as a couple of years ago, thanks to the contrasting financial fortunes of Liverpool and Manchester City, and the conjuring of Harry Redknapp. Global recession has exposed the sort of fiscal larceny that enabled Liverpool and Manchester United, through a combined debt of £1bn, to build a moat against the siege laid by such talented generals as Redknapp, David Moyes and Martin O’Neill.

Admittedly the cost even of deadlock remains exorbitant, as we saw this week when O’Neill walked out on Aston Villa. For the majority of Premier League clubs, the spectrum of ambition falls between seventh and 17th. But that does not have to corrode the self-respect and motivation of professionals or fans.

Perhaps football’s institutional intolerance of managerial failure should prompt the rest of us to think of the awards we won’t see handed out. Take a guy like Alex McLeish, who last season led Birmingham to their highest finish since 1959. They recorded the longest unbeaten run of the Premier League season, and last lost at home in September. Requiring opposition strikers to find a way past Roger Johnson, Scott Dann and Joe Hart deserved a medal for defensive intransigence.

Of course, if ninth place is supposed to represent giddy achievement, his excellence can strictly allow McLeish to aspire only to mediocrity. So what can possibly spur his career – other than the sort of chance that falls all too rarely, nowadays, to men like Roy Hodgson?

Well, Hodgson compounded recovery and stability at Fulham with genuine ambition in the Europa League. O’Neill, interestingly, had turned his back on a similar opportunity when sparing eight first-team players a trip to CSKA Moscow in the Uefa Cup the previous February.

Those of us who greet the first dayof a new season with such excitement can only do so in the hope that our heroes are animated by pride, honour and dignity. Yes, the Premier League is a more natural environment for mercenary players than, say, the Bundesliga, where responsible regulation has secured a genuine, competitive flux – and, in turn, huge crowds.

But that just makes it all the more important that we celebrate those who introduce greater purpose, to their teams and fans, than is realistically available in the rewards for finishing, say, 10th instead of 13th.

So who, this time round, might win the sort of team-building gongs merited by McLeish or Hodgson? Bolton fans are likely to recognise the right stuff in Owen Coyle, as he builds upon the talent of Lee Chung-yong. Love him or hate him, meanwhile, at Blackburn Sam Allardyce will be dashing opposition egos on the bulwarks of Steven Nzonzi and young Phil Jones.

But how about Roberto Martinez, the perfect antithesis of Allardyce? The Wigan coach is resolutely pursuing a philosophy that seems either heroic or reckless, depending on your point of view. (Case for the defence: defeats of Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool. Case for the prosecution: those 8-0 and 9-1 thrashings in London.) Martinez not only seems to have kept his most coveted players, he has also made two of the summer’s most intriguing signings in Mauro Boselli and Antolin Alcaraz.The former, at 25, has been a prolific goalscorer in Argentina, while the latter made his recruitment from Bruges look especially prescient when proving a rock for Paraguay at the World Cup.

A lot of people are tipping Wigan for relegation. But that is why even a mid-table finish would vindicate men who go to work knowing that it all counts for something. From the best people you never hear the old, broken lament: “I could have been a contender.” They know that the daily contest, the weekly contest, has ample meaning beyond the season’s final laurels.