November international break is tranditionally a managers graveyard but Saints couldn’t even give the Will Still project until then before pulling the trigger. Even the best intentioned ‘long-term project’ will hit the rocks if the results are poor and the expectations are high in the short term, especially when the fans have had enough of losing over a long period and turn on the board in a very public way in a home game. On one hand, it seems strange to appoint a manager with very little experience and then expect him to get it right straight away. If you sack him, then maybe appointing a long-term project, kind of manager really isn’t for you.

Appointing any manager is a gamble but some are more of a gamble than others. You’ve also got to look at the gambler and the gambler’s past record. As anyone knows, a regular gambler who doesn’t have a good record always ends chasing the big win with ever bigger gambles, and usually ends up going bankrupt. They always think that one day they’ll be millionaires, as the phrase goes. Taking your philosophy from Delboy is not likely to end well.

So, Sport Republic and gambling. First up Nathan Jones, a data driven gamble from Rasmus Ankersen, based on the assumption that metrics in the Championship would translate to the Premier League. Surprise surprise, they didn’t and then there was a small matter of his personality. Gamble Number 1 spectacularly failed and then we get to Ruben Selles, highly rated by the hierarchy but never having previously managed a senior game of mens football. A career in development football, where winning is secondary to player improvement wasn’t really likely to get us a run of wins to stay up. He got appointed off the back of a lucky 1-0 win at Chelsea and then presided over our relegation looking progressively more clueless, with his inexperience massively on show. 0 out of 2 for the gamblers.

Gamble 3 was Russell Martin but this was less of one because he at least had a track record in the division he was managing in, and he did well and got us promoted and was our most successful manager by far under Sport Republic, until he got to the league he had no experience in and then it completely went to shit as he totally underestimated what was required to even have a chance of winning games at that level. So, that gamble worked at the level where it wasn’t so much of a gamble.

Ivan Juric was a massive leftfield gamble because though he was experienced in other countries, he had never managed in England and it turned out to be another shitshow, which was no surprise, given that he was further down Rasmus Ankersen’s original list than Nathan Jones. The appointment of another zero-experience manager in Simon Rusk to salvage some pride until the end of the season, ended with him not winning a game and then Sport Republic put everything on red with the appointment of Will Still, rather than pay comspensation for Danny Rohl or anyone else with a bit more of a track record. Yep, you guessed it, another failed gamble.

So, what’s next?

There are lots of bookmakers of course all have their own books on managers who Saints will be appointing next but for the sake of this example we will concentrate on the intrinsically linked Sky Sports and Sky Bet. Think about the way that managerial books work. Someone comes up with a list of names of out of work managers and managers who have prefereably had some connection to Saints in the past and then put them in some sort of order. At that point, people start betting on it and it’s in the betting companies interest to have people moving around in the betting, so if someone is 20-1, Sky Sports will start dropping his name in here and there as a ‘rumoured preferred candidate’ and then people put a few quid on so he goes up in the betting. Sky don’t have to be reporting any facts or have any quotes from someone relevant or anything – they just have to be dropping a name and their sister company Sky Bet will make money from people buying it hook, line and sinker and chucking a tenner on. Suddenly, the rumoured manager rises in the betting and the world keeps turning, clicks on websites and the money-goes-round.

Cynical me? To quote John Lydon, “I could be wrong, I could be right”.

The hilarious thing about all this is that people are gambling on what decision Sport Republic will make which at best, is completely random and lacking in any logic and is absolutely akin to pissing in the wind. How many people would’ve bet on Danny Rohl being the new Saints manager in the summer, until for some reason that all went wrong because of Sport Republic doing Sport Republic things and deciding not to pay the compensation and instead, to appoint a 32 year-old gamble who had never managed in England or had any sort of playing career anywhere. The money saved on compensation, no doubt going straight out the door in payoffs for Still and his staff a few months later, with the team 21st in the league..

So what of some of the names that have come up since Will Still departed.

Gary O’Neil. Before last weekend, his was the name being drip fed by Sky Sports etc because he was low-ish in the betting and his potential appointment would not only get people having a flutter, but would also drive clicks on websites because of his past. On the face of it, the former Bournemouth and Wolves manager would not be the worst of shouts but of course there is one thing on his CV that makes that potential appointment rather problematic. That of course is that he started his career at Portsmouth and has made various statements and social media posts declaring that he’s a Pompey fan and they were his boyhood club. So, the first thing I think about regarding this potential appointment is that there will be very small margin for error, in that if he loses a couple of games then the crowd is gonna turn very very quickly. All the Agent O’Neil shite is going to start from the dark end of the M27 and it would be irritating in the extreme. Maybe they don’t care but I think Sport Republic need an appointment that is at least going to unite the fan base for a while and this won’t. Maybe they wouldn’t have cared about it before the Sheffield Wednesday home game, but the crowd reaction to O’Neil at that game means that they probably should care. They cared enough about the fan abuse from the Preston game to sack WIll Still after all.

Another issue is that in January we are going down to Fratton Park for what will be in the fans eyes, the biggest game of the season. A tweet from O’Neil has just re-emerged where he referenced the Harry Redknapp game in 2005. It’s ironic that he mentioned that game because if he was to manage a Saints team down there, it would give their fans ‘hate figure motivation’ and make our task down there even more difficult. It wouldn’t be the same level of the Harry Redknapp Judas stuff that went on in 2005, but it would be similar, and we all know how that game ended when our players shrunk, which is exactly what would happen with this current collection of players. The media would make that game all about O’Neil and Pompey fans will be even more unbearable in the build up to the game and perish the thought that we turn out there and don’t get a positive result. There’s also the fact that his managerial record is hardly so good that it can’t be ignored. It’s average at best and not worth the hassle.

If I was O’Neil and I knew my next job was going to be in the Championship, I would be hanging around waiting to see if John Mousinho’s departure from Fratton Park becomes a thing and I would want to be in the home dugout for that game in January against the Scummers. Which Pompey fan wouldn’t like that opportunity?

The other name who has friends in the media is Russell Martin, who left less than a year ago and was responsible for about the first 20 or so games of our Premier League campaign, such as it was. Why on earth would you give the job to someone who basically started all this off? There were mitigating factors, of course, because we didn’t have players suitable for the Premier League, but that was his responsibility as well because he was in charge of recruitment in the summer along with Darren Mowbray. He also completely failed to realise that the Premier League needed a different style of approach with these players than the Championship did, and instead, doubled down at every opportunity even though it was blatantly obvious that with a team that struggled to score, you didn’t need to be giving the opposition the opportunity to score easy goals by giving the ball away in your own half repeatedly. I’ll always be haunted by that away game at Aston Villa when the Villa fans were cheering every time we got a goal kick because they 100% knew they were winning the ball back in our half and having another shot on goal. Russell Martin did well for us in the Championship, with a set of players that were better than virtually anyone else’s squad in the division. I guess that’s potentially the attraction for Dragan Solak, not to mention the fact that he’s the only Sports Republic appointment that has been anything other than complete shite for the entirety of his tenure.

The only way you could consider appointing Russell Martin again, is if you felt he had completely learned from his experience at Saints but his experience at Rangers tells you otherwise. Do not go there. From Russ‘s point of view, why would he come back to the club that sacked him a year ago to work for the people who we can’t stand because they sacked him? Money is the easy answer but with his payoff from Saints and payoff from Rangers, I very much doubt Russell is short of a few quid and the fact that his girlfriend is the Saints fan, really shouldn’t factor into anyone’s thinking here.

I don’t think it will be O’Neil and I don’t think it’ll be Russell Martin. If anything, the move that I am expecting Sport Republic to make is basically no move at all and to leave Tonda Eckert in place. Tonda is of course a very similar age to Will Still and with even less experience. In sacking Will Still, 99% of people have concluded that it was a gamble that probably shouldn’t have been made, and it’s not altogether surprising that it failed to pay off. It would surprise no one if the 1% who think that it’s worth giving that kind of thing another go and having another gamble, is Sport Republic. Tonda has had the grand title of one weeks managerial experience so far. Admittedly, in his favour he has won two games with the same players that Will had won two games with all season. The main caveat against that being evidence that he can step up to the full-time role, is the fact that both QPR and Sheffield Wednesday were pretty average as oppositions go, with QPR only having won once at home all season and Sheffield Wednesday only having won one game anywhere all season. It’s not enough of a body of work to earn you the top job at Southampton. If you were interviewing from scratch for the managers job, one of your questions would be – “How have you turned around bad run of form in the past?”. An experienced manager could point to time when he prove that he did turn things around by maybe going back to basics and his core philosophy (Ralph Hasenhuttl post Leicester 9-0) but with Tonda Eckert we have no way of knowing and nor does he. Everyone has to start somewhere however but this in my opinion is too big a job to go into with stabilizers on your bike.

I think that as a Saints fans at the moment, because of the last year and a half, we are very much down on the club and think it’s all shite. If you couple that with the natural humility of people from Southampton, then it would be tempting to think we should settle for whoever we can get. The facts are somewhat different however. This is an absolute prime job for someone. It’s a very good chance to get promoted, even this season if we get it right, and find yourself as a Premier League manager and those jobs as we all know, are extremely hard to come by. Being a team with parachute payments and all the infrastructure in place, we are a great job for someone and there are plenty of managers with decent experience whose next job is going to be at Championship level and they’ll see this as a very good opportunity. None of these scream out at me as ideal choices for various reasons but Ange Postecoglou, Ole Gunnar Solkjaer, Patrick Vieira, Steven Gerrard and Michael Carrick are all landing in the Championship for their next job in England.

So, what Sport Republic shouldn’t be doing, is selling us short. With Norwich, Middlesbrough and Swansea all joining us in looking for managers at the moment, it will be interesting to compare who we all end up with. Aside from Middlesbrough’s current league position (their highest for years), the Saints job has more going for it than all of those so logically, we should be able to attract the better manager. We have the parachute payments for starters and talking of those, it’s a fact that we have precisely this season and next to get back to the Premier League before the arsehole falls out of the finances and it will be interesting to see how Dragon Solak responds if that comes to pass. Maybe not getting promoted by the end of next season would hasten the departure of Sport Republic so, every cloud and all that. We ourselves don’t really want to take a gamble on that scenario.

So my message to Sport Republic is stop gambling with this fantastic football club, stop trying to be fucking clever and trying to desperately find some sort of edge that we do not need at Championship level.

Will it be Johannes Spors making the decision or will it be Rasmus Ankersen. Maybe Dragan Solak will pull rank or maybe Phil Parsons has got his eye on the manager role himself. I’m not even joking because no one can predict what this lot will do, but I feel that the most likely scenario is that Tonda Eckert will be given the next three games and if he does well in those, we will probably give him the full-time gig, which I still think will be wrong for the reasons outlined above. If it goes pear shaped however he loses a few games then we are appointing a manager in a panic again and much more likely to get it wrong.

Tonda Eckert, like Will Still, may turn out to be the next Jose Mourinho over his managerial career but would you want to gamble on that? Sport Republic love a gamble as we know but as we also know, they are not very good gamblers and with a record like theirs, their Sky Bet account would be severly in the negative.