Raj Singh is looking to make his fifth managerial appointment after less than two years as chairman and the pressure is on to make the right decision.
There is not much further to drop from 14th in the Blue Square Bet Premier League, get the next appointment wrong and one wonders if promotion back to the Football League will ever be achieved. Furthermore, one would worry for the future of the club the longer it continues to attract such low attendances.
They are averaging 1,879 - the lowest of all the clubs in the division relegated from the Football League over the past ten years - while the team is languishing in the lower half of the Blue Square Premier. It's hardly what was expected on the back of the FA Trophy win.
Winning silverware last May has proven not to be the springboard that supporters hoped for.
An opportunity to ride the tidal wave of optimism after Wembley was not taken and now a third season outside the Football League is more than likely, unless Singh gets the next managerial appointment right and the club's league position is quickly turned around.
That will be the new manager's aim and the fact he will inherit a good squad, on paper at least, will offer an opportunity for success assuming he can find a formation that gets the best out of his players, something that Mark Cooper was unable to do.
Singh and the club's supporters will hope the next manager can coax the best out of players such as Liam Hatch, Marc Bridge-Wilkinson, Adam Rundle, and others who have not been at their best, in order to lift the team up the table.
But to achieve that ambition, the next manager is likely to need funds and how much cash is available is in question given the pedigree of Cooper's final two recruits.
Last week he brought in strikers James Gray and Nialle Rodney, two players that had not scored a senior goal or even started a senior game. If that is the standard of player that Darlington are in the market for these days then the identity of their next manager is almost irrelevant.
It was a frustration of Cooper's that he was unable to compete financially with the likes of York, Fleetwood, Luton et al. He was repeatedly beaten to the signature of his preferred targets with Jason Walker, Richard Brodie and Amari Morgan-Smith all going elsewhere with money being a crucial factor.
Aside from being unable to rival other clubs' salaries, length of contracts available to potential new players was also much to Cooper's chagrin - he found it difficult to persuade targets to move to the region with the lure of no more than a one-year deal.
That Singh is reluctant to commit himself to deals beyond the end of this season - none of the current squad's contracts stretch beyond June 2012 and neither did Cooper's - raises concerns about the chairman's long-term aims.
He admitted on BBC Tees last night: "I'll have to assess the situation and look at where we go, but let's not look at that now, let's look at whoever comes in, hope they hit the ground running by winning five or six on the bounce and we'd be up and away."
For now he and managing director Graham Fordy are filtering through a number of CVs from prospective managers, and where they go from here is difficult to predict as they have a chequered history of appointing managers.
There's been a former international boss (Steve Staunton), a former Championship manager (Simon Davey), an unproven ex-pro (Ryan Kidd) and then came Cooper who possessed non-League experience.
That there's been so many in a short space of time tells its own story: there's been some poor choices since Singh took the helm at the Arena in August 2009.
The stability Singh craves, that the club desperately needs, is not assisted by regularly changing manager.
Recently the Teesside businessman admitted: "We've been trying to build some stability at this club and, slowly but surely, we've made a lot of progress since Mark's appointment last summer."
That was only a fortnight ago, in the aftermath of defeat at Bath when Singh launched a staunch defence of Cooper, saying: "We showed last season how you can turn things around when you hit a low ebb and we have to do the same now. It's important for everyone to get behind the manager and for the players to know we're all fully behind the team."
The chairman's view quickly changed though, as four games later, after Saturday's 3-1 defeat at Braintree, Quakers and Cooper "parted company", leaving Singh looking for his fifth appointment.
Having already hired and fired more than enough managers, he should know what he is looking for in a candidate and whoever is chosen he needs to be right man otherwise the consequences could be dire.
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