Former Southampton head coach had a strange approach to building team spirit but he also inherited a weak squad
: “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.
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.
It always baffled me when I saw pundits and media personalities decrying Jones in such stern, po-faced terms. People gotat 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.
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.
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