Pellegrino Finally Manages to Get Sacked

The End of an Error

I’m not religious person but thank God for that.

I didn’t see how he could possibly survive after the Newcastle game but I thought that many points this season and he has survived, so in many ways, it is still a surprise that the Board have finally bitten the bullet and sacked Mauricio Pellegrino. He was useless.  Absolutely useless with boring risk averse football, abysmal results (5 League wins out of 30), abysmal communication and no redeeming features whatsoever other than being a nice bloke. I don’t want a nice bloke being the manager of Southampton Football Club. I want someone who’s got a bit of grunt about them and can kick the players below and hit out against the Board above to try and get things moving at the right direction.

I have always thought that the manager is the most important person at the club and never bought into Nicola Cortese’s “just another department head” dismissal of the managers role. The first team manager underpins everything else at the rest of the club. It doesn’t matter how great your academy is or how great your recruitment is, if the first team manager is substandard and he cannot get the players at his disposal to play to their potential then everything crumbles, the club gets relegated, valued staff have to be let go, budgets have to be slashed, you become even more the prey of the bigger and more powerful clubs and it all comes crashing down pretty quickly. If your first team manager is really good on the other hand then it can mask deficiencies all over the rest of the club. Look at Rafa Benitez and Newcastle and the fact that every other aspect of the club seems to be a complete shambles under Mike Ashley.

I wrote a piece after 10 games of Pellegrino which highlighted a few concerns I was having at the start of the season.  Reading this back, it’s remarkable how Pellegrino never learned despite always saying that he was learning.

“It’s up to Pellegrino to make sure that he’s not on the way out in the summer and the only way he’s going to do that is playing some braver, more entertaining football and taking a few risks, especially in home games and against teams we should be beating”

http://leagueoneminus10.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/pellegrino-10-games-in.html

The next game was a pathetic home defeat to Burnley when Sean Dyche changed his tactics and Pellegrino just stood there like a rabbit in the headlights and we lost 1-0. It was after this game the first came to the conclusion that we were going to be in serious trouble if he stayed in charge and so it has proved. There have been so many games that have been badly managed by Pellegrino, either through nonsensical tactics, overly negative team selections or ridiculous substitutions and reshuffles. He of course had no idea how to send out a team to take a game by the scruff of the neck and try and win it from the first whistle, hence why we only have three home wins (out of 16) all season. The players as always are partly to blame but under other managers, all of these players have in the past performed better than they are now. Like I said, it is down to the first team manager to get the most out of the resources at his disposal and Pellegrino completely failed to do this.

The board have finally acted and they had to. They have got the last two appointments wrong, especially this one and now they have to get it right. Mr Gao did not become a wealthy man by having the subject matter experts who worked for him getting things horribly wrong. I would imagine that if Les Reed gets this appointment wrong then the three strikes and you are out rule will apply.  If you look at the quote in the picture at the head of this article, it's obvious that Les had no idea what he was recruiting.

As for who we get next, well don’t believe anyone who says this isn’t an attractive job because of the board or any issue over the ownership of the club. The first team manager at Southampton Football Club is probably one of the top 10 or 15 football posts in the country. The names mentioned in the immediate aftermath of Pellegrino sacking that were in any way sensible were Mark Hughes, Slaven Bilic and Marco Silva.  There were other names mentioned which were obviously put there by people who have no prior knowledge of Southampton Football Club. It really doesn’t matter that Harry Redknapp is out of work and he is based in the South. It really doesn’t.

I am firmly of the opinion that any relatively competent manager will be better than the guy we have just got rid of. Whoever it is will be massively incentivised to keep the club in the Premier League and have the bonus of an FA Cup 6th round tie against the League 1 club. Win that and they are leading the club out at Wembley in an FA Cup semi-final. For the new manager, they are either going to be a hero or they are going to be a person who had no chance.  Is it tough on Pellegrino that a new manager might end up leading the team out at Wembley – no it isn’t.  We beat Watford in the 4^th Round despite of him and his ridiculous game management.

I would prefer Silva or Hughes out of the three managers mentioned. Silva will be short-term, maybe even till the end of the season if his track record of looking for the next big opportunity is anything to go by but Hughes would be a longer term bet and despite being old enough to remember when he played for us, I don’t have the negative view of it that many others seem to. He wasn’t much good as a striker for us but when he dropped into midfield and partnered Chris Marsden in the Great Escape games, Dellhurst Park and all that, he was absolutely superb and played as if his life depended on it. He was 36 years old at the time and had had a long career playing for some of the biggest clubs in the world and had won everything so it says a lot about his personal pride that he played like that when it would’ve been easy not lift a leg and be like Jamie Redknapp was a few years later in similar circumstances.

There was an element of doubt about sacking Claude Puel after an 8th place finish and a Cup Final. There is absolutely no doubt about the decision to get rid of Mauricio Pellegrino. It of course should have been done a lot earlier but that will be forgotten if we somehow manage to get out of the hole that we are in.  He has been the worst manager we have ever had - Ian Branfoot isn't even in the conversation when you consider Pellegrino, Steve Wigley, Harry Redknapp and Jan Poortvliet.  All of the others had mitigating circumstances in the form of substandard playing squads but Pellegrino does not.

A big cloud has just disappeared and now, whoever the new managers, us supporters have a bit of hope again.  It may turn out to be false hope but at least we have a chance now.