Bouncing back with Nathan Jones: friend, boss, non-league entertainer

QPR have had some brilliant managers down the years. Take Alec Stock, who won the League Cup, or Terry Venables, who won himself a move to Barcelona. Dave Sexton led the club to within 15 minutes of the title; Neil Warnock won the Championship while annoying finger-wagging purists with satisfying regularity; and Ian Holloway was good at improv. But the hits have not kept on coming. Mark Hughes, Harry Redknapp and Steve McClaren, for goodness sake. Whatever did they expect? Mark Warburton took three years to go nowhere in particular, Michael Beale required a mere six months before bolting off to Rangers, and now Neil Critchley has been booted, 12 matches into a three-and-a-half year contract, leading some to suggest director of football Les Ferdinand is struggling to differentiate between his Rs and his elbow.

Sir Les needs to come up with a doozy to get an increasingly-irritated fanbase back onside, and if the betting markets are anything to go by, he’s lining one up all right in the shape of Nathan Jones. Older readers may remember Jones as the manager of Southampton, but he’s been getting on with his life since then, and on Saturday he turned out on the left flank for Cranbourne against Wareham Rangers in the Dorset League, setting up an early goal before picking up an injury not long after and going off. Folk more cynical than Football Daily would call back to those “fittest human being in history” quotes, but plummeting 11 tiers in just under a week must surely take a severe toll on the body, the descent so rapid we’re surprised Jones hasn’t perforated an ear drum. In any case, he’d parked his ego to do his friend at Cranbourne a favour, helped them to a 4-0 win, and has already copped such a disproportionate level