Monday, December 3, 2018

Spark Out




Follow Me Lads...This Way!

With the Titanic holed beneath the waterline and sinking fast, Ralph and Chairman Gao have decided to rearrange the deckchairs. The particular deckchairs in question are the ones containing Mark Hughes, Eddie Niedzweicki and Mark Bowen and those particular deckchairs have been tossed over the side. It’s not women and children first, it’s Welshmen.  Coming as it does, on the back of our most impressive performance of the season, it is a bit of a surprise but I think we can safely assume that the defeat at Fulham last week persuaded whoever it was holding the gun, to pull the trigger.

When Les Reed was fired, Motivational Hockey Ralph said that he felt the squad was a lot better than the league position showed. He was basically saying that the manager has the tools to get us higher up the league than we are. Unless things had turned around more or less instantly, then Hughes was a dead man walking and of course, whilst performances have been in the main been not bad, in that we should’ve beaten Fulham and we should’ve beaten Manchester United and we should’ve beaten Leicester in the League Cup - we didn’t actually win any of those games..  Results business – off you go.

Hughes did what he was supposed to do last season and kept us up, thus earning the job on a full-time basis. Les Reed was never going to have the bollocks to not appoint him bearing in mind his previous two appointments were shite. He was the manager who had had an audition and passed it but like a player who is great on trial until he earns a permanent contract, that’s when the struggles started.

At the tail end of last season, Hughes had implemented a 5-4-1 formation and we had stayed up. All way through the summer we played a variation of three or five at the back and then after a shit half hour on the first league game against Burnley, he ditched it and we ended up going back to the 90s, playing 4-4-2.  It wasn’t all bad but this of course was on the back of having signed players like Vestergaard, Armstrong and Elyounoussi who don’t on the face of it, fit easily into a 4-4-2 formation. Ironically, in the last two games when we have looked a lot better, we have reverted to 3 at the back and it did actually look like he might actually be getting it right finally but there you go, too little too late, 1 league win out of 14 and off you go.

So who’s next. As revealed by club pet national journalist Jeremy Wilson, the name in the frame is Ralf Hasenhüttl who was manager of RB Leipzig last season.   In his last two seasons he has taken them to 2nd and 6th in the Bundesliga.  He has the reputation of being the Austrian Klopp and whilst we all admire the Klopp style of football, if Hasenhüttl joins us, we can only hope that he is not a monumental bell-end like the Liverpool manager.  If it is Hasenhüttl then we are going to have to get used to having two Ralphs in control of things.  In the mix for the Director of Football role is Paul Mitchell, also at RB Leipzig at the moment. Mitchell is the one credited for the fantastic recruitment we had a few years ago but he’s also the one who fucked off to Spurs and did the dirty on us regarding the Toby Alderweireld deal. I guess we can overlook that if he fancies coming back here. As I write it looks like Hasenhüttl will be announced imminently but it will be Kelvin Davis taking charge of the team for the sacrificial trip to Wembley against Spurs.

So farewell to Mark Hughes. His managerial career was somewhat similar to his playing career at Saints. He joined late in his career and there was the odd moment where it looked like it was going to work out but ultimately it will be regarded as a bit of a failure with him leaving with the lowest win percentage of any manager we’ve ever had.  It’s hard to see where he goes from here having being sacked from two Premier league clubs within 12 months but it won’t be our concern any more. A few of our players have notably improved under him this season with Redmond and Lemina being the obvious two. Good luck to the guy as he is undoubtedly a decent hard-working bloke but it didn’t work in the timeframe it needed to work which was admittedly shorter than usual because of the shambles of the last two managers we have had.

No comments:

Post a Comment