Venables faces his biggest salvage job yet

At W H Smith's at Leeds railway station, the book of the week in the business section is one of those miraculous American "how-to" volumes promising, in this case "a remarkable way to boost morale and improve results". It might sound like ideal reading for Terry Venables on the coach journey across the Pennines to tomorrow's match at Bolton – it is expected that he will still be sitting in the front seat – but a mile out of town along Elland Road they are beginning to realise that for a football club the quick fix is rarely the most effective one.

There is no book in the financial section or anywhere else that recommends handing "a naïve young manager" (David O'Leary's self-deprecating description) the best part of £100m to spend in his first job, then sacking him and seeking a new fix with a successor handicapped by having to sell the best assets. So how best to "boost morale and improve results" when that strategy is not working after four months? Sack the new man, which would involve adding another ridge to the debt mountain, and start again, or keep the faith?

The only easy way out for Leeds United would be if Venables was to decide that he no longer needed the aggravation and would be happy to return to either the ITV studios or the Spanish holiday home he was enjoying when a telephone call came from the club chairman, Peter Ridsdale, last July. But tempting as it may have been to hitch a lift to the Costa Del Sol with Malaga CF, Leeds' conquerors in the Uefa Cup on Thursday night, the cheeky chappie declined to take it. There he was the following morning, a foggy Friday the 13th, fronting up a third media conference in successive days with the same message as the previous two: that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Venables has been criticised for restlessness (he has never stayed in a job longer than four years) and for wanting to try his hand at more areas than some deem appropriate for a mere old pro. At 59, however, his experience can only be a plus in Leeds' troubled plight. As a manager-coach, he has sat on the bottom of the table, as well as the top. There have been salvage operations which worked, like Middlesbrough, and others that did not; cups won and others dashed away, like Australia's qualification for the World Cup, the penalty shoot-outs at Euro 96 and a decade earlier in the European Cup final. The boardroom skirmishes at White Hart Lane were equally valuable.

"Without a doubt you can take strength from those sort of experiences," Venables said. "The Spurs experience was a really tough one that I wouldn't want anyone to have to go through and I think there's no doubt if that sort of thing doesn't destroy you completely it makes you tougher. When I first went there, we were hovering round the bottom, but we came through it. You can't control a lot of things that come at you, but you can control what you do about it and that's important for all sides of life."

Since a misleadingly encouraging start to the season, bringing four wins out of six and an enjoyable few hours at the top of the Premiership, "things" have been coming at him from all angles – not least the irate supporter charging the dug-out on Thursday and Lee Bowyer's appalling rush of blood to the boot.

There were the departures of Rio Ferdinand and Robbie Keane, then an unprecedented run of injuries at both ends of the pitch; five strikers seemed enough to be going on with until Mark Viduka and Harry Kewell went lame before Robbie Fowler and Michael Bridges were fit; in the last Premiership game, Alan Smith collected a suspension, as Alan Smith does – he will miss the Bolton trip – and after five minutes on Thursday Bridges, making his second start of the season, collapsed in agony with nobody near him, his Achilles tendon ruptured. He will be out for the rest of the season. Nick Barmby, missing for the past month, cannot step in.

A poor defensive performance by Michael Duberry and Jonathan Woodgate cried out for the return of Dominic Matteo and Lucas Radebe, but the former is hors de combat until February and Radebe broke down again on Friday morning. Olivier Dacourt, Seth Johnson, Stephen McPhail... the flurry of injury blows is one factor that not even Venables has experienced before.

There is another: the hostility of a section of the home crowd. Barcelona's supporters, with their white handkerchiefs, have never believed in sparing a coach's sensibilities, but before things turned sour there, "Mister" Venables had delivered the Spanish championship – his best riposte to those insisting "put your cups on the table". The Nou Camp had never heard of the young coach recommended by Bobby Robson in 1984 and therefore had their pessimistically low expectations exceeded; Leeds, the doldrum years forgotten, had been encouraged to think big again as O'Leary led them to a Champions' League semi-final and then, for much of last autumn, the top of the Premiership.

"We are a club that panics very quickly," the Irishman warned in an interview with The Independent last March, reading the runes correctly as a run of defeats set in amid the fallout from the Woodgate-Bowyer trial. Seven wins in the last 10 matches could not save him from that panic, an air of frustrated impatience pervading the directors' box and the terraces. It was (presumably) from a section of the latter area, rather than the former, that a chorus of "Terry, Terry, time to go" was heard as Malaga took surprisingly complete control towards the end of Thursday's tie.

"I've not had it [crowd abuse] that much before," Venables said. "You get used to it. You don't want it and it's not comfortable. At the end of the game they were disappointed and that's natural. I try not to pay too much attention to the crowd. I just want the players to hold up. Considering the circumstances, I think they've held up pretty well."

And the manager? "I would prefer the world to be on my side, but they're not. I've not doubted whether I should have taken the job. It's an experience, a tough experience. Whether it's my toughest, I don't know, I won't know that until I've finished. I'm only in the middle of this one. So I'm just doing my job and that's what I intend doing, unless anything happens that makes me feel different. As yet, I'm carrying on with what I'm doing."