It’s one of those big decisions that affect all of us at some point in our working lives. You’re holding down a steady job as a pundit on Match of the Day, but then along comes the opportunity to manage Newcastle United. What should you do?

Tricky one. They don’t, in the careers advice business, call this crossroads moment “Shearer’s Dilemma” for nothing. Both positions, obviously, have their attractions. On the one hand, there’s the Match of the Day role, offering fulfilling work, handsome remuneration and a high public profile with a decent incentives package and plenty of time off. And on the other hand there’s the Newcastle job.

How to decide, then. Obviously, it’s a decision that no one can make for you. But by applying the right strategies, you can at least cut through the complexity and alleviate some of the burden of deciding.

So let’s begin. What you’re going to do is take a clean sheet of paper and draw a line down the centre. Then, on one side of the line you’re going to make a list of all the positive things about the Match of the Day job and on the other side of the line you’re going to list all the positive things about managing Newcastle. It sounds corny, I know. But trust me. It will help you to achieve clarity, which will make the decision process that much easier.

First, let’s think about all the things that make the Match of the Day punditry position attractive. Under this heading you may want to note items such as “quality time with Lee Dixon”, “paid-for trips abroad for England games, with nice hotels” and “I get to put on a red nose and corpse amusingly in a hilarious prepromote for this year’s Sport Relief campaign”. Something else you may consider writing here: “Easy peasy lemon squeezy.” Right. So that’s the positives about the Match of the Day job dealt with. Now let’s consider the pluses on the Newcastle side.

OK. Now that we’ve done that, let’s turn the sheet of paper over, draw a line down the middle again and this time we’re going to make lists of the negative things in each case – the drawbacks.

In the Match of the Day column, for example, you’ll probably want to say something about pressure. The programme is watched by some of the most passionate viewers in the land. If anybody deserves success, it’s the viewers of Match of the Day. And this means that, as a pundit, you carry the weight of their expectation. And they’re not after just any old success. They want success delivered with style and flair and with, preferably, minimal input from Garth Crooks. It’s your duty to bring them that. Are your shoulders broad enough?

Also, Match of the Day does involve quite a lot of weekend work. But so does the Newcastle job, of course – although you wouldn’t have to be there much into the evening on a Saturday. You would, however, have to work in the week as well. Again, you will have to measure up the pros and cons.

Plus, the Match of the Day job can get in the way of your golf. Not often, nor for very long, it’s true. How do you think Alan Hansen has managed to keep his handicap down around the scratch mark all this time?

Of course, the line “unfriendly to golf” would be even more true of the Newcastle job. Did Sam Allardyce, in the closing stages of his tenure and particularly in the rain during that FA Cup tie away to Stoke City, resemble a man who had been spending a lot of time working on his short game? No, he resembled a man who had been beaten up for 14 hours with the bunker rake. The last Newcastle manager to try to combine the job with a proper number of hours on the fairway was Ruud Gullit, and look what happened to him.

Something else to think about: can you manage Newcastle while sitting with your legs wide apart? I mean really wide apart. That kind of thing takes a studio and a free-standing, steel-frame chair, by and large, and today’s dugouts just aren’t built for it.

In any case, managing Newcastle will, like as not, involve standing in the technical area at least some of the time, looking agitated, while as many as 50,000 people shout: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

There’s no easy solution. As I say, in the end, only you can decide what’s right for you. And take all the time you can because you want to get it right. After all, the chance to manage Newcastle doesn’t come up more than three or four times a year. I’m often asked: “How will I ever know?” But I promise, there will come a point where one or the other will feel like the right thing to do. Then you’ll know.

Ice and easy for born natural Greg Rusedski

So, to the weekend’s top question: can Greg Rusedski get it together and pull a big one out of the bag for the opening round of Dancing On Ice tomorrow? Asks don’t come much bigger in the world of celebrity challenge television.

Furthermore, when you consider that the former world No 4 is up against Linda Lusardi, the former Page 3 Girl turned Emmerdale actress – no slouch in a strapless dress – and Aggie Mackenzie from How Clean Is Your House?, who has shown herself to be pretty commanding when it comes to a tidy landing, it’s little wonder that so many analysts are predicting the mother and father of all rink-based scraps for the retired tennis man with the random grin.

We, though, have some good feelings about this one. Remember that, before Rusedski tired of the cruel, almost publicity-free regime in his homeland and sought political asylum and magazine covers in the UK, he was a passport-carrying Canadian. And the thing about Canadians is that ice skating is in their genes. Just look at Leonard Cohen.

That’s why we’re tipping Rusedski, under the inscrutable eyes of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, to storm the contest – or certainly to go farther than Michael Underwood, the series’s token GMTV presenter, who, in keeping with an immutable law laid down for these shows, should end up being about as much use as a chicken in a hurricane.

So, go the Gregster. And bring on the feelgood factor. With Andy Murray positively on fire in the build-up to the Australian Open and the big-smiling grass-court specialist shaping up nicely for a long run on ITV, British tennis hasn’t looked in such good shape for years.

Brolly no folly says McClaren

Regrets? Steve McClaren has had a few. But then again, too few to mention. And if he had the chance to do it all again – tell us, would he? Could he?

“If the circumstances were the same,” McClaren announced this week, “and I needed a brolly on the touchline, well, you have to be your own person.” You do. That’s what leadership is. It’s about using a brolly when you feel it appropriate. And equally, it’s about not listening to the people who are telling you not to use a brolly because it makes you look vain and/or a berk. If we learnt nothing else from the McClaren era, we at least learnt this much.