STAN COLLYMORE Second-rate appointment for a second tier mindset
COLLY COOKIE IS SO TASTY
MARK HUGHES has really disappointed me in his last three jobs.
Things didn’t go particularly well for him at Fulham, at QPR, or at Stoke.
And when he was given money to spend, he didn’t spend it wisely.
I felt a little sorry for him at the start of his reign in the Potteries, when he was charged with changing a very formulaic style of football with not a lot of resale value in his squad.
But when he was handed a few quid he signed marquee players like Xherdan Shaqiri, Marko Arnautovic and Bojan on big money and that unsettled the dressing room.
Managers have to be certain that players they have signed fit in with the lads already there.
At Stoke, however, those signings created a ‘them and us’ mentality, with the the new boys on one side of the divide and the old pros who’d been there under Tony Pulis stewing on the other.
What Hughes (right) should have done was go for young, hungry players rather than big-hitters – I’m certain it would have worked out much better for him if he had.
That’s why he has disappointed me and, frankly, I don’t see him as a Premier League manager any longer but a boss for the top end of the Championship.
Even though his contract at Southampton is only until the end of the season, I’m pretty certain that’s how they see him as well.
His appointment looks to me as if Saints are already starting to strip things down because they fear relegation, or at least have an eye on it. I have to say I am surprised they left it so late to pull the plug on Mauricio Pellegrino, who struggled to get a tune out of the players at St Mary’s.
They will have been gauging the mood for a while now, judging the feelings in the dressing room, and they should really have acted before January.
Instead, they’ve left it until there are only a couple of months remaining in the season. That’s too late. It’s almost as if they have sleepwalked into relegation.
Strategy
Maybe they are thinking that the Mark Hughes who played for Manchester United, Chelsea, Barcelona and Bayern Munich might just be able to come in and produce the miraculous results they need.
Or maybe they are thinking, ‘Hey, we’ve got a Steve Bruce- type character who’ll be able to get players to come to us when we are in the Championship’.
It’s a surprising strategy for a club which likes to think of itself as forward-thinking.
Hughes’s appointment looks like a reaction and I’m not sure he’s the motivator the Saints dressing room is going to respond to in the coming weeks. But it is a situation that Southampton have pretty much backed themselves into after years of doing very well in the Premier League.
The sheer number of managers they have allowed to pass through is ridiculous – the board needs to have a look at itself and address what is a bull**** mentality.
A mentality which says, ‘ We’re going to lose our manager to a bigger club in two years anyway because we’re not yet big enough to make the jump and become one of them’.
That tells managers to use Southampton as a stepping stone, just as Mauricio Pochettino and Ronald Koeman, and even Claude Puel in his own way, have done.
Poch left for Tottenham, Koeman for Everton, and Puel got some vital Premier League experience on his CV before they got rid of him.
I mean, would Leicester have moved for him after sacking Craig Shakespeare if he hadn’t managed at St Mary’s? I doubt it.
What Saints bigwigs need to ask themselves now is, ‘ Why haven’t Burnley lost Sean Dyche? What is he being offered at Turf Moor that we couldn’t offer our guys when bigger and better clubs came calling?’
When they have those answers they need a manager who will stay with them for four or five years and make sure the best players want to stay as well.
That man may or may not be Hughes, but whoever it is they need to sort it out quickly if they want to continue to be a serious topflight club. ball down and play. whose sides can get the