Frank de Boer had a long list of the managers who stuck to their principles and were ultimately rewarded for not panicking when results went against them, although whether one of Holland’s finest players will have that luxury at Crystal Palace remains to be seen.

The most-capped outfield player in the history of the Dutch national team, and a Champions League winner, finds himself up against it at Turf Moor on Sunday, needing a win that may save him from serving the Premier League’s shortest-ever managerial term. At Palace’s training ground in Beckenham on Friday he ran back over the greats who had slow starts at big clubs, although none of them ever faced a reckoning at Burnley.

He recalled his old mentor Louis Van Gaal, under whom he won a 1995 Champions League with Ajax, suffering two draws and a defeat in his first three Bundesliga games at Bayern Munich before doing the domestic double and reaching the Champions League final. He recalled his former Holland team-mate Giovanni Van Bronckhorst losing seven games in a row midway through his first season in charge of Feyenoord, and going on to win the Dutch cup and then the Eredivisie the following year.