You’ve probably heard the story about Nathan Jones and the ping-pong table, but just in case you haven’t. It’s 2016 and Jones is in his first spell at Luton Town, desperately trying to instil a winning culture at an underachieving League Two club, and he decides that the squad table tennis league is becoming a problem. So he does what comes naturally to him. He burns the table down.
Perhaps my favourite part of this story – narrowly pipping Jones’s admission that he had to “smash the table up first to get it flammable” – is the way he rationalises it afterwards. “There was a big table tennis culture,” he says. “So I thought, ‘I can either cajole them and try to get them into the gym. Or I can burn the table’. It was far easier to burn the table.” In the mind of Nathan Jones, these are the only two options: persuasion or immolation. And after Jones exited Southampton after a chaotic 94 days, it struck me that this was roughly the same binary he applied to Premier League management.
