Nathan Jones’s exit robs us of the funniest manager in Premier League history

Y ou’ve probably heard the story about Nathan Jones and the ping-pong table, but just in case you haven’t. It’s 2016 and Jones is in his first spell at Luton Town, desperately trying to instil a winning culture at an underachieving League Two club, and he decides that the squad table tennis league is becoming a problem. So he does what comes naturally to him. He burns the table down.

Perhaps my favourite part of this story – narrowly pipping Jones’s admission that he had to “smash the table up first to get it flammable” – is the way he rationalises it afterwards. “There was a big table tennis culture,” he says. “So I thought, ‘I can either cajole them and try to get them into the gym. Or I can burn the table’. It was far easier to burn the table.” In the mind of Nathan Jones, these are the only two options: persuasion or immolation. And after Jones exited Southampton after a chaotic 94 days, it struck me that this was roughly the same binary he applied to Premier League management.

Farewell then, Nathan. You claimed after losing to 10-man Wolves that teams often improve after an early dismissal, and the Southampton board followed your advice. You declared after the 3-0 defeat by Brentford: “I look at that team and I don’t see myself in it.” Perhaps, on reflection, you were more of a visionary than we thought. And if there is any scintilla of regret here it is that you were sacked before we ever truly got to explore the outer limits of your weirdness. Taken from us and sacrificed to the mob when you clearly had so much more to give: as a devout Christian, this is a tale you will probably be familiar with.

The consensus is that Jones’s position was made untenable by results, which is true but only tells half the story.