Fiddling around with the 16 mid-sized laggards who failed, or marginally passed, the summer stress tests is not enough.
A November report by a British thinktank noted a rise in close military encounters between Russia and the west this year, including "violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided mid-air collisions, close encounters at sea, simulated attack runs and other dangerous actions happening on a regular basis over a very wide geographical area".
Two years later, he was at it again.
But Smith's failure to make a major impact in Europe - the finest moment probably being the home-and-away defeat of Leeds United in 1992, later missing out on a Champions League final place by one point - led to the clamour for something new.
He fled Paris on a bicycle during the Nazi Occupation and, after a stint in the French Resistance, later found himself by chance serving as an air force photographer in France's Indo-China war in the early 1950s, travelling through Vietnam and then Cambodia, completely self-taught.
Despite relegation, the West Sussex club were keen for Saunders to remain as manager and talks were planned with the Crawley chief executive, Michael Dunford, for later this week.
Those weren't lazily phoned in or sent via SMS, either; you had to write out your selections (the 0055 number came later) and post them.
And yet, in the 1970s, Thistle were only narrowly defeated on a vote for Scottish League membership in their own right by Ferranti, later Meadowbank, Thistle.
He only admitted the murder of Roy Tutill more than 30 years later when he was caught drink-driving in 1999 and his DNA matched that of a sample found on the dead boy's trousers.
She remembered "skiving off" with Kennedy during a trip to Australia in the mid-90s to watch the film Trainspotting.
By my mid-twenties my career was on a distinct and structured path.
