SAINTS SACK MANAGER NATHAN JONES AFTER THREE MONTHS IN CHARGE
Southampton Football Club have parted company with manager Nathan Jones, the club announced on Sunday morning.
A statement from the club confirmed that first-team coaches Chris Cohen and Alan Sheehan have also left the club. The club also confirmed that Rubén Sellés will now take charge of training and preparing the team ahead of their next game against Chelsea.
Jones has had some controversial moments at Southampton since becoming the team’s manager 3 months prior. A left-field option to replace former manager Ralph Hassenhutl, Jones led Southampton to seven defeats in his last eight league games with the club, winning only one contest.
Jones’ last straw at the club was Southampton’s 1-0 loss at home to 10-man Wolverhampton on Saturday. Jones said after the game the fact that Wolves had 10 men was to Southampton’s “detriment” as it “made it [the game] a free hit for them [Wolverhampton] and added more pressure” on the team.
Southampton’s director of football and the Chief Executive Officer of the club’s ownership group Sport Republic, Rasmus Ankersen said the club relied more on data analysis in making Jones’ appointment three months ago. “The analysis was that Nathan [Jones] has been able to significantly improve the parameters that we think needed to be improved here,” he said.
Ankersen referenced the club’s previous lack of clean sheets and a deficiency in set pieces as the “key” to staying in the Premier League. Using a data-analysis program that rates European managers according to their spending, Nathan Jones was among the top five coaches last season as he guided lowly Luton Town to the Championship playoffs.
Jones raised eyebrows after last week’s 3-0 defeat at Brentford, claiming that he had compromised in certain unspecified ways since arriving at the club and referred to “certain people in the village and players in the building” that he had to work with. His excuses did him no favors as the away fans at Brentford Community Stadium came away from the game chanting “You don’t know what you’re doing” and “Get out of our club.”
While he repeatedly stressed he was “taking full responsibility” and talked of “getting back to basics” in training this week, Jones said he was convinced Southampton could survive in the Premier League and that he was “categorically’ the right man for the job.
Enthusiastic about putting up a fight in the second half of the season, Jones said, “I don’t think I’ve done anything personally against anyone so I don’t know if I’ve got to build any bridges… The Premier League is the biggest, scrutinized league in the world, the biggest pressure in the world. I’ll be dead, soon… one day. And I will look back on these days and think, ‘How did you stand up? How did you come through it? Did it build your character? Did you wilt? Did you go backwards or did you face them full on?’ My life depends on this and I love pressure. I love the challenge.”
While Jones’ certainly ‘interesting’ press conferences did little or nothing to save his job, the 49-year-old was dealt a tough hand coming in as the new manager. Southampton lost both Danny Ings and Oriol Romeu over the previous 18 months, two of the most crucial players for the Saints, both offensively and defensively.
The club has struggled to replace the two and through the disbursement of more than £60 million added Croatian and Argentinian midfielders Mislav Orsic and Carlos Alcaraz, winger Kamaldeen Sulemana, and forward Paul Onuachu. The Saints squad has through the years deteriorated greatly but the team has not performed well since its semi-final finish in the FA Cup during the 2020/21 season.
Southampton will need plenty of squad restructuring if the club is relegated this season and no one knows that more than the club’s director of football Rasmus Ankersen, who promised that ‘ego’ would not get in the way of the decision to sack Nathan Jones.
“If we think the right thing is to change the manager, we will change the manager,” Ankersen said this past week. “We will make the decisions that we think will maximize the probability of staying in the league. If you keep losing games, you can’t do that forever. At some point, you hit the point where it’s enough.”
Southampton currently sit 20th on the Premier League table with 15 points, having won only 4 of 22 games and lost 15. With the club linked to former Leeds United managers Marcelo Bielsa and Jesse Marsch as Jones’ replacements, one can’t help but wonder how big of an ask this will be for the next manager to salvage this team from the throes of relegation. The Saints are four points away from 17th-placed Leeds United, who still have one more game to play.
-Maher Abucheri
Twitter: @pabloikonyero
Photo: David Ingham. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.