On Monday afternoon it was difficult not to flash back to the surprising chain of events on the other side of the New Forest on 18 January 2013. A decade on from Southampton replacing Nigel Adkins with Mauricio Pochettino, when the club dumped the double-edged news in an ice-cold statement, Bournemouth informed Gary O’Neil he was no longer their manager and promptly – well, just two and a half hours later – named Andoni Iraola as his successor.
Southampton were lampooned for dismissing Adkins, accused of disrespecting a manager who had taken the club off the canvas in League One and to the bright lights of the Premier League, via successive promotions, and of, frankly, making a ludicrous decision. O’Neil’s journey at Bournemouth, whom he joined as a first-team coach under Jonathan Woodgate in February 2021, was a more rocky reign but the job he did to avoid relegation with a degree of comfort this season rightly put him in the conversation for manager of the season.
