The Grimsby game last Saturday was always going to be a make or break day.

Sadly, the result made for a depressing outing for supporters and can't have sent the Gaffer home with much to look forward to either.

Hinshelwood must surely be counting down the days until the chairman hands him his P45 and it will be sad to see the departure of such a basically decent chap.

Unfortunately, being a decent chap is no substitute for coming up with a result and results are what provide such limited job security as any football boss can hope to enjoy.

Football management has little in common with work in the sense that most of us experience or understand it. Successful managers receive the sort of rewards us ordinary people would bite our own hands off for but, when things go wrong, the rewards quickly evaporate and the manager rapidly becomes history.

Supporters, however, like historical details and while the Dear Departed may move swiftly on to greater things, his time at the club will be a permanent entry in every Anorak's Almanac.

Hinshelwood's entry is already being written in the stands and post-match watering holes and the verdict is compassionate.

Like Steve Gritt and Jeff Wood, Hinsh will go down in Albion history as a nice bloke who could not quite deliver the goods. His loyalty to the club is unquestioned but this won't make relegation any easier to bear.

Loyalty is a highly subjective quality and measuring it is a very inexact science. Some people will swear that the only loyal supporter is the one that stood on every terrace on every cold Tuesday night at a Division Three game hundreds of miles from Brighton.

Others will suggest that there are more and just as meaningful ways of demonstrating commitment than by checking off the fixture list.

As a starting point, however, loyalty has to mean wanting the greatest possible success for your club and this is where misunderstandings between clubs and supporters tend to arise.

Our current situation looks like presenting a perfect example of misunderstood intentions.

Totally committed fans who have been through enough bad times to get the good times in perspective are watching the team go downhill fast. They have rationalised the first few defeats and taken account of contributing factors but eventually the crunch comes.

As it did last Saturday when it became obvious that something radical has to happen if the team are to stay up. Hinsh is the man with whom the buck stops and he knows that he is the first in the firing line.

The fans are not being disloyal to him or to the club when they suggest it might be time for the chairman to pull the trigger and dispatch him as humanely as possible.

It is precisely because they are loyal supporters that they have finally come to this conclusion. There is no animosity towards Hinsh. If anything, there is a strong body of opinion that wants him to remain with the Albion. Possibly as director of youth where his success in bringing on youngsters like Marney and Wilkinson has been evident.

But liking the man cannot always be enough because getting behind the team is all to do with recognising the downsides as well as the ups. When the downsides reach a point where you have to call into question the future of the boss, it is not disloyalty, it is a recognition of reality.

There's more than a row of stewards between fans and what happens on the pitch, there's a Grand Canyon. Of difference in perspective, that is.

A club is a business and from the chairman downwards that is how it operates. A fan operates at the emotional, rather than corporate level, and loyalty can't be tied up into a nice business-like package.

Roz South edits Brighton Rockz fanzine. Email roz@southspark.co.uk