The fan with the large cardboard P45 received there forward of the board, however solely by about 17 hours. Nathan Jones was duly sacked by Southampton after even the individuals who employed him accepted him that he was hideously miscast as their supervisor.
Jones bowed out with one final ludicrous assertion, insisting it was to Saints’ detriment that they discovered themselves dealing with 10 males for an hour at residence, and a last horrible outcome, giving up a lead at St Mary’s to a Wolves facet that includes fewer gamers and who, just a few weeks in the past, had been backside of the desk. Now Southampton are.
Few managers have united a fanbase as rapidly because the Welshman, who turned Jones Out right into a slogan on the south coast. He had a 100% report at St Mary’s – 4 league video games, 4 defeats – and misplaced 87.5 % of his Premier League matches; even the exception, victory at Everton, got here in a match the Merseyside membership believed they deserved to win.
There is a case for saying Jones’ report continues to be worse than it seemed, and never merely as a result of Southampton picked up the fewest factors and conceded probably the most objectives within the division throughout his tenure. None of his eight league matches had been in opposition to the highest 5. Three of his 4 residence video games had been in opposition to bottom-half opponents.
The eventual verdict, ought to Southampton go down, could also be that he burned his means by way of the extra winnable encounters. Meanwhile, the membership spent £60 million – second solely to Chelsea – in his temporary reign whereas positioning themselves to plummet into the Championship. Their third supervisor of the marketing campaign will face an unenviable activity.
Meanwhile, Jones joins an ignominious checklist. For a membership who’ve solely been relegated from the Premier League as soon as, Southampton have had a collection of managers promoted above their degree: Ian Branfoot, Stuart Gray, Paul Sturrock, Steve Wigley. Jones lasted 14 video games, yet another than Sturrock. He can lament that a lot the very best of them, the emphatic 2-0 win over Manchester City, got here within the Carabao Cup and never when factors at stake. Otherwise, he can have few grounds for grievance.
He had the World Cup, when Southampton’s gamers had been scarcely required in Qatar, to function a type of pre-season. He went by way of 9 formations within the house of three video games. Part of the issue – as within the Carabao Cup semi-final second leg at Newcastle – was that he generally began with the unsuitable one. Matches doubled up as video games of selectorial bingo. Within a half a dozen matches on the helm, followers had been chorusing “Nathan Jones, your football is s**t”.
They might have been fast to show, however they proved higher judges than the membership’s powerbrokers. Sport Republic had apparently studied the information that steered Jones was one of many nice managerial overachievers within the continent, relative to assets, at Luton. It suggests an extreme religion in analytics.
Brilliantly as Jones did in two spells at Kenilworth Road, Southampton neglected the the explanation why that excellence by no means appeared sure to translate to success elsewhere. Jones had failed at Stoke, his solely earlier expertise of managing bigger-name and better-paid gamers. Those feats at Luton might not have counted a lot with Southampton gamers who won’t have heard of him; actually it didn’t give him a constituency of assist within the stands.
And Jones seemed a small-club supervisor; he didn’t fare nicely below the microscope or in entrance of the microphone. His ridiculous rhetoric amused outsiders and irritated Southampton supporters. They had been fast to choose up on his behavior of referring to the crew as “they”. They had been in charge, not him. Whether his bravado got here from an extra of confidence or insecurity, it backfired. After his penultimate loss, at Brentford, he mentioned he had made the error of compromising, of listening to followers: his conclusion, it appeared, was that Southampton wanted Nathan Jones to be much more of Nathan Jones. He implied, whether or not in a slipshod little bit of phrasing or real perception, that he had been among the finest managers in Europe. Last week, he unusually mentioned he might have stayed in a mining group, turn into a PE trainer and married a Welsh woman. A couple of weeks in the past, he discovered himself embroiled in a public argument with the supervisor of non-league Havant & Waterlooville. Paul Doswell had described Jones as “out of his depth”.
It felt irrefutable by the top. The final fault lies with those that headhunted him, with director of soccer Rasmus Ankersen who was rewarded for sticking with Thomas Frank after a defeat-laden begin at Brentford however whose try to search out one other impressed selection went horribly unsuitable and who most likely ought to have acted sooner. Frank is proof managers from the Championship can prosper within the Premier League, however solely a few of them. When Aston Villa and Wolves had been appointing Europa League winners, in Unai Emery and Julen Lopetegui, to ease their relegation fears, Southampton changed Ralph Hasenhuttl, a runner-up within the Bundesliga, with Jones and plunged into larger hazard. His was by no means going to be a simple job, however his eight league video games might have a long-lasting legacy if, after 11 years within the Premier League, Southampton are relegated. Right now, it appears very possible they are going to be.