‘YOU PACKED YOUR BAGS, AS I RECALL …’
Football Daily used to love pontificating about the sport’s lamentable culture of instant gratification, until we started to get a bit bored of the subject. Alas, we’ll have to trudge over old – just give us a second while we check whether Mastodon have added a like button yet – ground, because on Wednesday night, after their defeat to Nottingham Forest, the Southampton fans chanted “you don’t know what you’re doing” at manager Nathan Jones, a man who has been at the club for five minutes (metaphorically) and five games (literally).
Southampton were booed off after losing their relegation it’s-not-actually-a-six-pointer-when-there-are-more-than-two-teams-involved-please-don’t-make-us-explain-it-again against Nottingham Forest, not even managing a shot on target against a team who have already lost 6-0, 5-0, 4-0, 3-0, 2-0 and 1-0 away from home this season. Southampton’s xG was a desperat … no, sorry, we’re not ready to enter that world yet. They have lost all four league games under Jones, despite playing well at times, so a hard-fought 2-1 win over Lincoln in the Milk Cup was never going to appease the harder core among Southampton’s fanbase. “I can’t pre-empt what fans are going to do but they are free to express their opinions,” tooted Jones after this latest defeat. “It does surprise me a little bit but it’s their prerogative and I understand their frustrations. We have to find a way to get through this together.”
We put Jones’s comments into Football Daily’s new, entirely fictitious Football Manager Translate service. We won’t bother posting the results, mainly because only about 5% of them – “entitled”, “little” – will get through the email firewall. “I’m from the Welsh mining community,” added Jones, at which point Football Daily started smugly humming the Hovis music, only to be brusquely reminded that the north of England and Wales are two entirely different places, and they filmed the original advert in Dorset anyway. “Everything I’ve done in my life is a challenge. I’ve never gone into a place like I left at Luton where everything is on a high and on the up.” Jones’s comments might have carried a touch more heft had he not lost to a team managed by Steve Cooper, who grew up in Hopkinstown, another former Welsh mining community.
P45s are printed in record time these days, and there are worrying precedents for both Southampton and Jones. In 2004, the year the phrase “boy, that escalated quickly” was introduced (and then misquoted by all of us) in the film Anchorman, Southampton had two permanent managers, Paul Sturrock and Steve Wigley, who lasted 13 and 17 games respectively. Stuart Gray’s spell as caretaker in 2001 was almost as long as his subsequent permanent reign, and a number of other managers had a Southampton career that was slightly longer than Ali Dia’s.
Jones has been here before, too. He left Luton to join Stoke in 2019, a deserved step up for an overachieving manager. He lasted 38 games, of which he won six, and then returned for another triumphant spell at Kenilworth Road. In his career, and with apologies for putting our tanks on Tim Sherwood’s lawn, Jones has a win percentage of 47 at Luton and 18 everywhere else. He deserves time to put that right, and the work he did at Luton suggests that, if they can be bothered to wait, Southampton could have an extremely good manager on their hands. But given the mood at St Mary’s, and the fact that Southampton are bottom of the table, we wouldn’t want to see his Expected Reign data.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I find it difficult to even talk about it. If it were up to me we would always play, this break has been a blasphemy and global football has gained nothing from it” – it’s safe to say that Lazio’s Maurizio Sarri, fresh off a seven-week Serie A hiatus due to the Human Rights World Cup, isn’t best pleased to have resumed with their 2-1 defeat to Lecce.
FOOTBALL DAILY LETTERS
“Re: yesterday’s Football Daily. Surely Everton are in grave danger of having the newest, largest and most expensive stadium in the Championship, when construction is completed in 2025? And then how will they pay the interest on the bank loans, he asks, schadenfreudingly? Instead of Sean Dyche, what about an emergency call to Sam Allardyce? A manager with an impeccable record of staving off relegation [West Brom? – Football Daily Ed]” – Gerald Williams.
“It might be seen as damning the great Pelé with faint praise, but maybe the Toffees could create a timely diversion from their current sticky patch (and get a gold star from Gianni Infantino) by renaming their ground Good-Edson Park?” – Jonathan McKinley.
Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’ the day is … Jonathan McKinley.
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