Two-year contracts - safeguards or shackles?

Looking at DC1 over the last couple of weeks, where the tone generally tends to be more positive and patient (or you might call it naive and easily satisfied, whichever you prefer), I can't help but note that the arguments for sticking with McCarthy even among his biggest supporters seem to be financially driven more than anything. There's a major fear that terminating his contract will simply cost the club too much money, and that for that reason alone we need to give him more time.

It seems obvious that the decision to give McCarthy a two and a half year contract back in January has backfired, and it would be easy to criticise the club for offering it. However, as the thread on DC1 shows at the time, people were generally delighted. I know there's the argument that a lot of dissenting voices were banned from the old DC and there was perhaps a degree of fear about saying anything "negative", but it's quite surprising that not a single person at the time said "hmmm, two and a half years, are we sure about this?"

So, what I thought might be interested to gauge is what supporters think our future attitude to manager contract extensions should be, and I'm going to present two scenarios to do this. I'm honestly not trying to have a go at anyone or make people change their minds, I'm just interested to know what people think is the better or less risky approach:

Scenario A - Scenario A is basically what's really happened. We offered Macca a contract extension in January and since then it's all gone a bit crap. We're now in a pickle over whether to stick with a manager who nobody appears to have much confidence in, or replace him at significant cost to the club.

Scenario B - Imagine that we didn't offer McCarthy a new contract, and he kept up the good pre-Christmas form, taking us to a finish just inside the playoffs. We don't go up, but it catches a lot of clubs' eyes that a rookie manager who took Chester to the playoffs on a shoestring is now out of contract. We lose McCarthy to Tranmere or Port Vale or someone for nothing, and he takes a few of our best players with him.

These scenarios show that both offering and not offering contracts has risks, and the club could find itself heavily criticised in either case, so which is the route we should take in future?

It seems like Scenario A should be the answer. If we have managers under decent contracts, it shows we have confidence in them, and that we have a long-term plan. It helps us to attract credible managers in the first place and stops bigger clubs poaching them. And with any manager you appoint, you should be doing so with a view to them being here at least a couple of seasons.

The only advantage of Scenario B is that it's easier to solve the problem if things go wrong, but I'm starting to think that's such a major factor that it is actually the better option to give managers no more than a rolling one-year contract. It may mean we get great managers pinched from under our noses, but we'll just have to pick up the pieces and "go again" as they say.

So, what do people think? Seeing as any manager is always just a few poor results away from serious pressure, should we be handing out 2-3 year contracts to ANY manager, or should we be appointed them on a rolling contract and accepting that we might lose a real gem for nothing? Or is a compromise somewhere between the two possible?