The Wright direction

Wright is used to the ambience of the Conference

BBC Sport Online's Paul Fletcher examines the challenge facing new Chester City boss Mark Wright.

Managerial assignments do not come much tougher than Chester City.

The beleaguered club are second bottom in the Nationwide Conference, just three points clear of Scarborough, who have two games in hand.

The club are one of the most troubled in the country, still reeling from the Terry Smith era.

Smith breezed into town in July 1999 with big ideas and ambitious plans.

Smith's period as owner of Chester was unsuccessful and controversial

The American promised to pack the team with internationals and lead a march through the divisions.

When manager Kevin Ratcliffe left the club a month later Smith took charge of team affairs.

At the end of the season Chester were relegated from the league after 69 years.

The merry-go-round of chaos, rumour and crisis continued, with Smith eventually disappearing from view at the start of the current campaign.

New Chester boss Mark Wright need only look at the managerial causalities this season to realise Hollyoaks is not the only soap opera in Chester.

Graham Barrow was sacked as manager in the summer, replaced by youth team boss Gordon Hill.

  Wright's managerial career

Southport: Dec 1999 - May 2001

Oxford: May 2001 - Nov 2001

Chester: Jan 2002-

Hill left the club in October, with new owner Stephen Vaughan appointing former Tranmere player Steve Mungall.

But Mungall failed to haul City away from the lower echelons of the Conference and was sacked after just three months.

Wright - himself a man with damage to repair - is the latest to try and reverse Chester's fall from grace.

The 38-year-old recently resigned from his managerial post at Oxford - the club where his playing career began - under a cloud.

He was fined £1,750 by the Football Association after he made an offensive remark to a black referee and resigned before he faced disciplinary action at Oxford.

The former England international had signed a three-year contract with the U's in May 2001 and his departure from the club ended a logical if undistinguished progression through the managerial ranks.

Wright was a star of the 1990 World Cup

Wright was a brilliant central defender, enjoying a career that took him from Oxford to Southampton, Derby and Liverpool.

Comfortable in possession, an excellent reader of the game and a superb tackler - Wright was in some ways the template for players such as Rio Ferdinand and Jonathan Woodgate.

He was also a lynchpin of the England team that reached the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup.

Yet when injury ended Wright's career in 1998 he willingly accepted the relatively modest position as manager of Nationwide Conference Southport.

He was happy to cut his managerial teeth in the traditional way, stepping down a few leagues to learn his trade.

Wright's apprenticeship was unspectacular but the Sand Grounders did make progress.

Experienced old pro's like Mike Marsh and Shaun Teale helped bolster his team and Southport moved from 21st after Wright's first season to ninth in 1999-2000 and fourth the following season.

Wright was invariably linked with managerial vacancies at Second and Third Division clubs but resisted all overtures until Oxford came calling.

New challenge

The U's, with new owner Firoz Kassam bringing a stabilising influence to the club, appealed to Wright.

As recently as 1986 - during the Robert Maxwell era - Oxford were a top-flight club and winners of the Football League Cup.

In taking over at Division Three Oxford, Wright joined a team that clearly represented the next stage of his development as a manger.

But he also moved to a club with the potential to climb the league and match his own medium-term ambitions.

Wright's Oxford won juts four of 22 League games

Wright's unceremonious departure - and his record of just four wins from 22 league games - brought an abrupt end to his steady upward progression.

And he is now back at the beginning of the managerial game of snakes and ladders.

Wright bemoaned at Southport the club's part-time status.

But at Chester he will once again have to operate within the tight financial constraints of club's at the wrong end of the Nationwide Conference.

Whether he can succeed where Barrow, Hill and Mungall have failed remains to be seen.

But one thing is for certain - both Chester and Wright need their new partnership to succeed to right some recent wrongs.