Nathan Jones will ‘work religiously’ but Saints don’t seem to have a prayer or an identity

Nathan Jones’ first home Premier League game as Southampton manager turned out to be a bit of a disaster, and a reminder of how the club has stagnated.

It wasn’t just the result itself, though that was bad enough. If Southampton supporters were in a gloomy state of mind after their team’s 3-1 home defeat against Brighton, it was as much about the nature of the defeat as anything else.

Southampton vs Brighton isn’t the biggest local derby that either team faces. Southampton turn their ire westward towards Portsmouth while Brighton’s is reserved for Crystal Palace. But to lose this match was about more than three dropped points. Not only did a win for Wolves at Everton root Saints to the bottom of the Premier League table, it also said something quite profound about where Southampton find themselves.

The difference between the two teams was painfully evident in several different respects. Southampton were accident-prone, effectively gifting Brighton their first two goals, and identity-free. There was little discerning what the home side were actually trying to achieve, while the visitors had a plan and, even with World Cup winner Alexis Mac Allister absent, the players to deliver it.

New manager Nathan Jones may well be concerned at the fact that there seemed no signs of his fingerprints upon Southampton despite having had a six-week break to work with.

Jones is plenty aware of the opportunity that the timing of the World Cup gave him, having said at his first press conference that: “It gives me an opportunity to work with the players and they get to know a lot about me and understand how I and my staff work.” But the first performance after that break offered so few signs of any significant improvement that some are already starting to ask whether it might have been a mistake to bring in a new manager with no Premier League experience to try and dig the team out of the relegation places. 

And when people start to perceive such changes as being potential mistakes, attention will inevitably turn to those making those changes in the first place. Sport Republic are approaching their first anniversary as Southampton’s owners, and the results so far haven’t been particularly impressive. The team’s form for much of this season has essentially been an extension of how they finished the 2021/22 campaign. Having lost nine of their last 12 games – a run which saw the team drop from 9th place in the Premier League to a final position of…