For the fifth time in the two-and-a-half years of Clem Morfuni’s ownership of Swindon Town, they are on the hunt for a new man to guide the first team.

Michael Flynn’s era was a confused mess on and off the field, never able to run away from a difficult summer transfer window in which Town left themselves desperately short on numbers.

54 goals conceded in 28 games was always going to be a recipe for disaster no matter how devastating Swindon could be themselves when they wanted to. Those halcyon days of August and September felt like a daze caused by the heat haze at the time and even more so now as the goals dried up, but the floodgates were never closed at the other end.

That freezing night against Accrington will always be how this tenure will be remembered. No lead was ever safe from a weak defensive structure that lacked the resolve to make up for it. Conceding nine goals in stoppage time alone painted a pretty scary picture of where Swindon were.

Refusing to criticise those above him and rarely accepting blame himself, the players and almost anything else were in the firing line in post-match interviews. The manager’s telling it like it is soon became sacrificing any lamb he could get his hands on as Swindon were hurled into a laid-back spin from which Flynn would never recover.

In any other circumstance, conceding seven goals to Aldershot Town would have been the end of something, but the problem was that it was only the beginning. Despite the form beginning to dip, Swindon rewarded Flynn with a new contract that nobody had asked for the day before. It seemed to be a marker of long-term faith in a man who was working with a threadbare squad and once that could be overcome then things might change. But whatever you think of Flynn, he was never afforded the opportunity that that contract implied he would be.

As much as the team could not defend and showed no signs at any point of that changing, he was never the primary cause of all that was wrong. Ownership has been striving for a long-term plan for quite some time but, for one reason or another, has never had the conviction to see any of them through.

Handing Flynn a lengthy contract felt like a strange decision, but once that was done and he was halfway through a transfer window for which he had been responsible for planning and had been allowed to sign three players in, why did a 2-1 defeat to Crewe Alexandra change things that much? What was so seismically different from a month ago that meant this decision had to happen in the middle of a window?

Getting rid of Flynn may well have been the correct move, but making the move when Swindon did feels like a tremendous blunder.

For the second consecutive January, Town are left in disarray as they look to recruit players without knowing who is going to be coaching them. The only difference is that Town abandoned their Director of Football and Head Coach model when they appointed Flynn, so the entire strategy was devised by the Welshman. Morfuni tossed him the keys in May, filled up his tank in November, and then shot out his tyres in January.

The pattern keeps repeating itself, the club puts their faith in a certain model, fails to supply the resources it needs to succeed, and then cuts bait when things go wrong. At this point, who has faith that the next U-turn will send Town down the right street?