THE football bubble is a hotbed for hyperbole. A loss is a disaster. Refereeing mistakes are catastrophic. Relegation is a tragedy.

Jacqui Low, the Partick Thistle chairman, knows all too well what those words really mean. Her professional life prior to leading the Firhill club has seen her encounter sights at Lockerbie, Piper Alpha and Dunblane that make a mockery of the footballing vernacular.

All of those experiences may have hardened her exterior, but there is no disguising the internal anguish that came with telling Alan Archibald his services as manager of the club he had dedicated half of his life to were no longer required.

On Saturday, after three years working closely as director with a man she refers to as a brother, and six months as his boss as they tried to drag the club up by its bootstraps after relegation, the time had come to admit that a change - however traumatic - was required for the greater good of Partick Thistle.

“After the game the board got together as planned, because despite some fans’ views that we were bobbing on unaware of what was happening, we had a plan from the start of the season,” said Low.

“We knew at which points we would be reviewing where we were sitting in relation to whether or not we were going to meet our objectives.

“It wasn’t easy, but it was a decision that had to be taken. It was based on facts and not emotions. It is harder to be objective, especially when it is a situation involving somebody who has been such an integral part of this club.

“But we made a decision that was the right thing for the club, and for the fans, and I hope that we then delivered that message to Alan and Scott (Paterson) in a respectful way in line with how we felt about them and what they had done for this club.

“We had started off post-relegation with an objective and a common purpose. We had given them time to show that they could achieve that, and it just hadn’t worked out. That didn’t mean that there had to be anger or anything else. There was a sadness, but we had to do what we had to do.

“Professionally, when I got up on Sunday, my focus had to be ‘who do we get next? Where is our next manager coming from?’”

That is the question now on the lips of every Thistle supporter. And the answer may not eventually be as predictable as many might think.

“We’ve had CVs from Scotland, the rest of the UK, and we’ve had them from abroad,” said Low. “We’ve had interesting CVs, we’ve had unexpected CVs, and we’ve had them from people that you might expect, but we are very pleased at both the speed and the quality of the interest.

“Three minutes after we made our announcement we got our first CV. That has just continued apace to where we are today. We have said that we will give people until Friday to get in touch with us, so we are assessing as we go.

“There will be first-stage interviews and then there will be a final shortlist to the board to see the candidates. There will be one, two, three, but probably not any more than that.

“It’s not actually about speed, it is about getting it right. It can’t just be some sort of short-term fill-in.

“They need to fit in with our ethos. Success on the pitch is the number one priority, but it is also about how they work with the people within the club because we all have a role to play in each other’s success.

“Youth for us is important. We have a youth academy that is now firing on all cylinders and we are now producing players that are making the first-team. There has to be that enthusiasm to work with the kids coming through and we have to have that presence in the team.”

The accent on developing young players comes from the work continuing apace behind the scenes on the Thistle Weir Academy and the new training ground, key pillars of the club’s infrastructure that Low feels have acted as major conductors of interest, and the solid foundations that will ultimately see them back onto the upwards trajectory they had been travelling on prior to their relegation.

And while Thistle may be adjusting personnel, there is no recalibrating of ambitions. Immediate promotion back to the Premiership remains the aim, and the new manager will be backed in order to fulfil that vision.

“It would be wrong for us to bring someone in and tie their hands at the outset, because I don’t think that we would get the quality of manager that we wanted if we didn’t give them some scope to make changes in the window,” Low said. “So, yes, there will be investment available to whoever comes in.

“We do though have a good playing squad, and I think we have yet to see the best of them individually and collectively. Someone will come in and make his own judgements about who he wants to stay and who he wants to go. That’s fine. But there is a team there that we believe can do what we want them to.

“We have to stick to our ambition. I know people are saying that’s difficult and we can’t do it now, but by our reckoning, we still can.

“We’re realistic that we are bringing somebody in and we are setting them a challenge, but they are only going to come here if they believe that they can achieve that.”