How Nathan Jones Turned Southampton’s Collapse into Charlton’s Championship Surge—The Untold Story
Inserting yourself into difficult scenarios can make or break your reputation. Unfortunately and unfairly, whereas some managers are able to bend narratives to their will through force of personality, exerting a sort of gravitational pull on the media, Jones’ magnetism seems to repel respect rather than attract it. In short, he’s seen in some quarters as… well… just a bit weird.
The parable of the ping-pong table always comes to mind. At Luton, he felt that his players’ table tennis league was taking up too much time and brain space, so he destroyed the table and set fire to it. Well, what else could he do, apart from ‘almost anything’? A colleague described the act as “performative psychopathy”, a wonderful phrase, but in Jones’ mind it clearly made a sort of sense. For better or worse, he is the world’s most intense human being – just observe his pitchside convulsions and prayers (he’s a devout Christian) at the end of the play-off semi-final second leg.
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