Doomed Southampton and Bournemouth look like mug punters for manager choices

Why did Bournemouth and Southampton both bring new managers who were completely inexperienced in managing at this level of the game with the stakes so high?

For the three south coast clubs of the Premier League, it was a weekend much like so many others this season; Brighton won while Bournemouth and Southampton lost. The contrast seems pretty stark.

While Brighton are basking in the revelry of what is surely their greatest ever team despite substantial destabilisation wrought upon them by external forces beyond their control, Bournemouth and Southampton are labouring under the weight of managerial changes which were entirely within their control.

Promoting from within and hoisting up a well-regarded name from a lower division both carry a certain romantic appeal, but they don’t come without an element of gamble, even more than making the decision to change the manager in the first place. And while the gaps between teams do remain wafer thin in the bottom half of the Premier League, three have to drop come the end of this season, and it’s difficult to see past these two making up two of the places. They look doomed.

Bournemouth have had a season of extreme disruption with a return to the Premier League and a change of ownership. The decision to relieve Scott Parker of his duties after just four games was probably justified, but it feels as though the club was sucked into making the wrong decision in replacing him with Gary O’Neil.

Having taken them to promotion at the end of the previous season, we might have expected that Parker would have been given more than four games to set his team on course, but this has to be balanced by the fact that they conceded 16 goals in three games, including a 9-0 hammering at Liverpool which has somehow managed to age so badly that it looks worse with every passing week.

It does rather feel as though Parker may have been fired as a knee-jerk reaction to that Liverpool result. Gary O’Neil – previous coaching experience: six months as the assistant manager of Liverpool’s under-23s and a year and a half as a coach at Bournemouth – was handed the position on a caretaker basis, but there seemed little movement in terms of bringing in a replacement. When the team initially reacted well to his appointment, talk began that he may given the position on a permanent basis.

Parker was relieved of his duties on August 30, but O’Neil’s job was not made permanent until the end of November. He’d started…