The fan with the giant cardboard P45 got there ahead of the board, but only by about 17 hours. Nathan Jones was duly sacked by Southampton after even the people who employed him accepted that he was hideously miscast as their manager.
Jones bowed out with one last ludicrous statement, insisting it was to Saints’ detriment that they found themselves facing 10 men for an hour at home, and a final terrible result, giving up a lead at St Mary’s to a Wolves side featuring fewer players and who, a few weeks ago, were bottom of the table. Now Southampton are.
Few managers have united a fanbase as quickly as the Welshman, who turned Jones Out into a slogan on the south coast. He had a 100 percent record at St Mary’s – four league games, four defeats – and lost 87.5 percent of his Premier League matches; even the exception, victory at Everton, came in a match the Merseyside club believed they deserved to win.
There is a case for saying Jones’ record is still worse than it looked, and not merely because Southampton picked up the fewest points and conceded the most goals in the division during his tenure. None of his eight league matches were against the top five. Three of his four home games were against bottom-half opponents.
The eventual verdict, should Southampton go down, may be that he burned his way through the more winnable encounters. Meanwhile, the club spent £60 million – second only to Chelsea – in his brief reign while positioning themselves to plummet into the Championship. Their third manager of the campaign will face an unenviable task.
Meanwhile, Jones joins an ignominious list. For a club who have only been relegated from the Premier League once, Southampton have had a series of managers promoted above their level: Ian Branfoot, Stuart Gray, Paul Sturrock, Steve Wigley. Jones lasted 14 games, one more than Sturrock. He can lament that much the best of them, the emphatic 2-0 win over Manchester City, came in the Carabao Cup and not when points at stake. Otherwise, he can have few grounds for complaint.
He had the World Cup, when Southampton’s players were scarcely required in Qatar, to serve as a kind of pre-season. He went through nine formations in the space of three games. Part of the problem – as in the Carabao Cup semi-final second leg at Newcastle – was that he sometimes started with the wrong one. Matches doubled up as games of selectorial bingo. Within a half a dozen matches at the helm, fans were chorusing “Nathan Jones, your football is s**t”.
They may have been quick to turn, but they proved better judges than the club’s powerbrokers. Sport Republic had apparently studied the data that suggested Jones was one of the great managerial overachievers in the continent, relative to resources, at Luton. It suggests an excessive faith in analytics.
Brilliantly as Jones did in two spells at Kenilworth Road, Southampton overlooked the reasons why that excellence never seemed certain to translate to success elsewhere. Jones had failed at Stoke, his only previous experience of managing bigger-name and better-paid players. Those feats at Luton may not have counted much with Southampton players who might not have heard of him; certainly it did not give him a constituency of support in the stands.
And Jones looked a small-club manager; he did not fare well under the microscope or in front of the microphone. His ridiculous rhetoric amused outsiders and annoyed Southampton supporters. They were quick to pick up on his habit of referring to the team as “they”. They were to blame, not him. Whether his bravado came from an excess of confidence or insecurity, it backfired. After his penultimate loss, at Brentford, he said he had made the mistake of compromising, of listening to fans: his conclusion, it seemed, was that Southampton needed Nathan Jones to be even more of Nathan Jones. He implied, whether in a clumsy bit of phrasing or genuine belief, that he had been one of the best managers in Europe. Last week, he strangely said he could have stayed in a mining community, become a PE teacher and married a Welsh girl. A few weeks ago, he found himself embroiled in a public argument with the manager of non-league Havant & Waterlooville. Paul Doswell had described Jones as “out of his depth”.
It felt irrefutable by the end. The ultimate fault lies with those who headhunted him, with director of football Rasmus Ankersen who was rewarded for sticking with Thomas Frank after a defeat-laden start at Brentford but whose attempt to find another inspired choice went horribly wrong and who probably should have acted sooner. Frank is proof managers from the Championship can prosper in the Premier League, but only some of them. When Aston Villa and Wolves were appointing Europa League winners, in Unai Emery and Julen Lopetegui, to ease their relegation fears, Southampton replaced Ralph Hasenhuttl, a runner-up in the Bundesliga, with Jones and plunged into greater danger. His was never going to be an easy job, but his eight league games could have a lasting legacy if, after 11 years in the Premier League, Southampton are relegated. Right now, it seems very likely they will be.
