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.
Farewell then, Nathan. You claimed after losing to 10-man Wolves that teams often improve after an early dismissal, and the Southampton board followed your advice. You declared after the 3-0 defeat by Brentford: “I look at that team and I don’t see myself in it.” Perhaps, on reflection, you were more of a visionary than we thought. And if there is any scintilla of regret here it is that you were sacked before we ever truly got to explore the outer limits of your weirdness. Taken from us and sacrificed to the mob when you clearly had so much more to give: as a devout Christian, this is a tale you will probably be familiar with.
The consensus is that Jones’s position was made untenable by results, which is true but only tells half the story. Fans will back a struggling coach if they can see a thread of improvement, a path to salvation, some sense of kinship. At the very least, it helps if you refer to the team as “we” rather than “they”. But in reality Jones was not sacked purely for losing football matches. He was sacked for being ridiculous, which in the prickly and harried world of Premier League football is often the greatest sin of all.
The irony here is that the same traits that made Jones unpalatable also made him utterly irresistible. Name one other coach who toasts a famous cup victory over Manchester City by picking a feud with the manager of Havant and Waterlooville? Or who says on his arrival: “I just praise the lord my wife’s not pregnant as, literally, that would be the most manic week.” Or who anoints himself as one of the best coaches in Europe on the basis of his xG at Luton. Meanwhile, “I want to test myself on every level, and that’s nothing against Welsh women,” is one of the all-time great football quotes. Seriously, could we not have wrung at least a couple more months out of this?
It always baffled me when I saw pundits and media personalities decrying Jones in such stern, po-faced terms. People got genuinely angry at this guy. Which is fine if you’re a Southampton fan: you love your club and your clown-shoed coach is frog-marching it down to the Championship. I get that. But I never really understood why everybody else was so bothered. This thing, this sport, this product, is supposed to be fun. And the Premier League had served up perhaps the funniest manager in its history. I swear you’ll never see anything like this ever again. So cherish it. Drink it in.
There was another, more poignant aspect to this spectacle. Frequently Jones’s quips and gaffes were taken as a symbol of irrepressible self-confidence, perhaps even arrogance. In fact like all the best sitcom characters, Jones always struck me as a man wracked with self-doubt, forever second-guessing himself, desperate to prove to himself that he belonged at this level. Perhaps this was why so much of what he said bore the ring of internal monologue: the little voices in his head arguing away while the rest of us pulled up a front-row seat.
The other point to make is that Jones was dealt a rough hand from the start. There is a more prosaic explanation why Southampton are bottom of the league: Southampton are not very good. Look at the Wolves team who beat them on Saturday: Rúben Neves, João Moutinho, Matheus Cunha, Pablo Sarabia. When was the last time Southampton had a squad that accomplished? This is a club that has been slowly stripped for parts, that has gradually lost most of its expertise on the pitch and much of the expertise off it. This, perhaps, is how it ends up hiring a new manager, sacking him after 14 games and then considering Jesse Marsch of LinkedIn as his replacement.
As for Jones, a crossroads awaits. For many, these 94 days will define perceptions of his talent forever. But you, Nathan Jones, you know better. Perhaps you feel you didn’t get a fair chance, perhaps you felt like things were slowly improving. But that war has been and gone now. You can spend the rest of your career explaining what went wrong, persuading and cajoling, carrying the baggage of Southampton around with you like a cross. Or you can smash it to pieces, burn the whole thing down and start afresh.
I think I know which option you’ll choose.
