Choose a young, motivated and super keen manager on his way up, or an experienced but recently sacked manager fresh off the merry-go-round of failure. Which would you rather have at the head of your team?

They say that you can't beat experience, but the more time that I spent working in professional football, the more I realised that more experienced could often just mean more bad habits.

Football, like many industries, seems to have a crazy rule of selecting people because of the length of their CV, unable to distinguish the difference between time served and impact made.

Time served is easy to assess. But because we all have different judgments and opinions on what constitutes success, it is often the case that when opting for that new manger to turn things around at a football club, a chairman will choose someone who has 'been there, seen it and done it'.

That usually means a manager with as many failures to his name as successes. So it's really a 50-50 chance of success with a manager like that.

So how refreshing to see Hartlepool United's latest managerial team made up of Colin Cooper and Craig Hignett. The latter I've come to know very well - firstly as a player, once in my physio care and lately as a colleague promoting better standards of performance in grassroots sport through this Feel Great For Sport Project.

And although Cooper is unlikely to remember me, I taught him, and Gareth Southgate, their emergency first first aid training to allow them to complete their Level 1 coaching badges, some seven or eight years ago now, when both were still players at Boro and ready to make the step into coaching.

Aware of my friendship with Hignett, all week people in my home town of Hartlepool have been asking 'what's he like?' and do I think he'll do a good job.

So here goes. Firstly, as a person, he is one of the funniest and most well-liked people I ever met in football.

Hignett walked into the Darlington dressing when we were then in League Two, probably at the bottom end of it, and was still a huge name in the game.

He was probably the first of David Hodgson's 'Glacticos' (Phil Stamp, Curtis Fleming, Alun Armstrong etc) as my mates from Hartlepool used to call them.

But Hignett arrived without a fuss, and aside for the Jacob and Co watch and the super-fast Mercedes sports car, he fitted in perfectly with the lads off the pitch.

Most of the problems came on it. Even at 35 he was often too good for most of the other players to link up with him to the team's benefit.

He had an intuitive ability to place a ball somewhere, or for him to be somewhere that the ball really needed to go, but others couldn't quite see it in time.

I'd seen one or two players coming down the leagues struggle to cope with this, and even be unable to communicate with team-mates off the pitch, but that was never the case with Craig.

And one of the things I realised about him very quickly was how well connected he is in the game. And that reminded me of Hodgson. His ability to reach players and then convince them to come and play for us was one of his biggest strengths.

So in someone like Craig Hignett, Hartlepool are likely to be able to contact and convince players to come to the club who otherwise may have turned their backs on the winter North Sea breeze at the Vic.

Looking back to those days at Darlington in the 2000s, we were getting huge help from Middlesbrough FC.

We were in League Two and despite Hartlepool playing one division higher, we were able to get loan access to incredible players at the start of their careers, such as David Wheater, Danny Graham, Ross Turnbull and Mattew Bates - we even had first pick of Gary Liddle back then too (how did he get away?).

And the reason that these players were allowed to come to Darlington was because of the Boro link of Marc Proctor and Hodgson.

Proctor was Darlo's assistant manager and former Boro youth team coach. So, in Hignett, Boro academy coach for a number of years now, alongside Cooper, it may be the case that two very respected coaches in the game are allowed and trusted to oversee the development of some of the region's greatest talents, a role that some failed managers wouldn't be given because of the bad habits and standards that can be so easily picked up.

And how do I think he'll do? Well, I'm just a physio, so my opinion doesn't really count for much and isn't ever going to be based on anything other than emotion, and certainly not great football logic.

So no bold statements from me. But as a Hartlepool lad, I'm so pleased to see him given an opportunity to do something that he has waited patiently for while working incredibly hard to get up the ladder.

I wish them both every success.