WHAT is it about the season of goodwill, mistletoe and wine that brings out the worst in some people – especially in the world of football?

Maybe it’s because it's the time of year for them to start believing in fairy tales and sleeping giants.

You can always rely on football’s rich owners to make sure that the sacking season does not pass them by without some unfortunate manager spending Christmas out of work.

The manager does not have to underachieve, make a pig’s ear of the job, or even drop the chairman’s favourite striker. All he has to do is fall victim of the unrealistic targets set by the man in charge of the purse strings.

Chinese millionaire Paul Suen Cho Hung is one such man and Gary Rowett is one of those managers.

Two years ago, Rowett took over a club that was skint and heading for relegation – a club that had, among its past owners, scrap metal dealers, rag traders, porn barons and a convicted money-launderer. He led them just one point off the Championship play-offs. He was a success.

Unluckily for him, it would seem that the new owners have bought into the most over-used description of Birmingham City – that they are “a sleeping giant.”

No, they are not. They may carry the name of Britain’s second-largest city, but in the world of football they have never been a giant of any kind – at least not in the lifetime of any of us here.

And if it happened before any of us was born, then it’s a heck of a long snooze for even the doziest giant.

True, City won the League Cup in 2011, but that, and a few second-tier titles and near-misses, is about it for a club that’s been around since 1875.

Gary Rowett probably won’t be the last manager to be sacked in 2016, but he must be the unluckiest.

GARY Neville gained 85 caps for England and played 400 times for Manchester United, so it is fair to assume that he was a pretty good defender. He needed all his defensive qualities when he faced three wise men of the press pack on Sky’s Sunday Supplement .

The trouble with the coffee and croissants session was that it was all too much of he-said-you-said over a minor spat between the Neville brothers and Liverpool’s young goalkeeper Loris Karius.

Neville criticised Karius, but when the German answered back he was told he should shut his gob!

A neat bit of footwork and wriggling was not quite enough to convince Neville’s breakfast that he really did have Karius’ interests at heart and he didn’t help his cause when he asked them why they had not remembered that he had called Manchester United’s Marouane Fellaini “pathetic” and “idiotic.”

Gary Neville is a popular pundit with some contentious views and he more than held his own. But after 90 minutes that included his less than flattering views of the views of the print press, and the FA (over the Wayne Rooney late drinks affair), I still can’t warm to the guy.

ANDY Murray’s third BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award was as predictable as the fact that tomorrow is Wednesday.

But as voting did not close until a few minutes before the presentation how come the BBC managed to get the trophy out to Murray’s training camp in Miami faster than the speed of light?

Of course, Lennox Lewis presented the world’s number one tennis player with a replica of the real thing – which is just as well as it was held together by sticky tape.

It rounded off the annual extravaganza of back-slapping and high-fiving among the great and good of the world of sport, but my moment of the night was the award to Leicester City’s Claudio Ranieri as coach of the year.

And to think that only a fortnight ago on one of the phone-ins there were calls for him to be sacked. Perhaps it’s as well for the Tinkerman that he isn’t coach of Birmingham City.