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.

Pellegrino 10 Games In

Mr Gao Looking for the Entertainment

10 games into the season and where are we and where are we going?  Let’s just say that we are playing in the same way and getting the same standard of results as we got post-Wembley under Claude Puel and we can’t ye know where we are going – obviously.

I saw a decent article posted on a Saints blog called the Archers Road End, which posed the question ‘What were the Board’s expectations for the season?’. Personally I thought at the start of the season that the target would be Top 7 and therefore Europa League qualification and entertaining football. One reason I thought that is because we didn’t sell anyone and another was Ralph Krueger’s bullish response to the Virgil sale bandwagon - “when the window closes people will see how serious we are”.  I took then non-selling as a statement of us being done with operating like that and now, with players on longer term contracts, we want to push on and just tweak things rather than having to replace 3 or 4 key players every summer.  I thought it was an acceptance by the board that running to stand still wasn’t going to be the way any more.  So, we didn’t sell Virgil van Dijk or Ryan Bertrand when we clearly could have done. I know it baffled the media because up until the day the transfer window closed, ‘Southampton always sell, it’s what they do’ was often heard and read.  I t was annoying to see or read that but you have to say, it’s been the truth up until now.

So why did we change tack if not to challenge higher? I can’t believe that a decision was made based on fans getting fed up with players leaving so it must have been the expectation to challenge higher. That theory falls down a bit when you look at the fact that we didn’t sign any attacking players and decided to make do with what we had but then maybe that was because they expected what we had to do better this season. Feasibly you could have expected Redmond to get better as he’s young and Gabbiadini and Boufal to improve with acclimatisation to the English game. You would also expect Austin to stay fit for longer and that Tadic couldn’t possibly be as ineffective as last season. Maybe the end of the transfer window was compromised a bit by the sale of the club to Mr Gao.

On the other hand, Mauricio Pellegrino’s assertion that he was hoping for 17 points from our first 10 games doesn’t support the theory of lofty ambitions. For that we would have needed 21 points plus from 6 home games and 4 aways where only one game has been against one of the big boys. Losing at home to Watford, drawing at home to Newcastle and Swansea and failing to beat either Huddersfield or Brighton away.  For me, we’ve left 8-10 points behind there.

I liked the fact that we stood up to the big boys and didn’t sell players but hindsight is 20/20.  I reckoned without the mindset of the modern player which appears to be getting worse with each passing season and after the opening 10 games, I’m beginning to think that maybe for our own benefit that it would have been better to sell the aforementioned van Dijk (not to Liverpool on principle) and Bertrand and reinvested the £100m-ish that they would have brought in. We sign players and make them better. The players see that and want to play for Southampton but we are not the final destination and we never will be in todays game. If a player comes on the radar of a big club then the player is going to want to go... and if we don’t sell them for a huge fee them then more often than not there’s going to be a tail off and a negative effect on Southampton FC.  For every Schneiderlin who got his head down and had a great season, there’s a Wanyama who played like he didn’t care.

Would we be in a worse league position if Sam McQueen had played left back and Wesley Hoedt hadn’t been left out to accommodate Virgil? Probably not. Would we be in a better league position if we’d invested £100 million on midfielders and attackers? Can’t say for sure but I’d say that it is extremely likely.  You also can’t underestimate the effect of having 11 players out on the pitch who really want to be there and are invested mentally in what the club is about.

Hang on a minute.... in my little scenario there, Pellegrino is still the manager. He’s come in with his best achievement being taking Alaves to mid table in the Spanish league and getting to a Cup Final. Alaves are the Spanish equivalent of Bournemouth - a traditionally small club who have done remarkably well to get in the top division. He achieved his Alaves success by playing very dour defensive football. Saints are already an established mid-table side with an entertainment problem so we didn’t need what Pellegrino had provided so far in his managerial career. Les Reed will have known this and therefore will have been expected Pellegrino to improve on that and grow as a manager like the relatively unheralded players we brought in.   Is Pellegrino a Sadio Mané or is he a Juanmi? 

Early signs are not great. He seems to be throwing a number of theories at the wall and hoping it sticks but everything seems to be based on fear or caution. He would rather pick a side that was safe and solid and dull rather than one that was a little bit unpredictable, exciting and might be brilliant.   Another stick that could be used to hit him with is that the Academy graduates, the pride of the club and major selling point, are not being picked this season and I think this is probably down to inbuilt caution in the manager.   Claude Puel played the youngsters whilst we were in the Europa League but as soon as we were out then in the main, he didn't.  

With Mauricio Pellegrino,  I think that if you’d offered him 36 1-1 draws at the start of the season which meant we stayed up then he’d have taken it. I can’t imagine that was what was wanted at Board level at the start of the season. Does Mr Gao want to be entertained? At least a bit? Or maybe he doesn’t care as long as we’re in the Premier League.

Our attitude in games against teams we should be beating has been very disappointing.  The basic theory that it’s better to win one, draw one and lose one than to draw all three seems to be lost on Saints and on a number of teams in the Premier League.  Three points for a win was brought in back in the day to make teams go for it more – maybe it needs to be 4 points for a win – however, a lot of managers would think their best chance of winning would be to bore the hell out of everyone for 85 minutes and then hope for a free kick.

At the moment, it’s hard not to see a season ahead which is exactly like the last one only without a cup final and finishing lower than 8th. With no tangible improvement, Pellegrino will undoubtedly be sleepwalking into being replaced at the end of the season. It’s not his fault that patience with him will be in much shorter supply after the season under Claude Puel.  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.  

I hope he succeeds of course but as I said earlier, the early signs are not good.