Albion come up against Southampton’s new manager at St Mary’s on Boxing Day but the Saints boss is an old friend of our club.
Nathan Jones moved to Withdean as a player from Southend United on July 1 2000 after an impressive performance against us for the Shrimpers and has also been first-team coach, assistant manager and caretaker manager too.
The Welshman made a total of 183 appearances in the stripes under Micky Adams, Peter Taylor, Steve Coppell and Mark McGhee, scoring eight goals and helping the team to three promotions.
Notable on his arrival among musically-educated fans mainly for having the same name as a classic 1971 single by The Supremes, he soon impressed everyone else with his wing-play on the left, including a trademark step-over that proved to be as distinctive and bamboozling a manoeuvre as today’s Gross Turn.
He scored his first two goals in a 6-2 home victory against Torquay United (slightly overshadowed by a Bobby Zamora hat-trick) and became an important member of a close-knit, competitive and successful core that also included Richard Carpenter, Charlie Oatway, Danny Cullip and others.
He left for Yeovil Town in June 2005, and took his first steps in coaching while with the Glovers, which he continued at Charlton, where he looked after the under-21s in the 2012-13 season. He returned to Brighton as assistant to Oscar Garcia, the Spanish he learned when playing for Badajoz and Numancia early in his career coming in very handy. “We had a great team spirit when I was a player and every day it was a joy to come in,” he recalled at the time. “Now the club has changed totally, gone global, but it still has a lot of the same values.”
He stayed on as first-team coach under Sami Hyypia and took over the hot seat after the Finn’s departure, remaining unbeaten in two games over Christmas 2014, a 2-2 draw at home to Reading and a memorable 2-0 win at Fulham – the best performance of the season to date and a result that took the team out of the bottom three. He threw his hat into the ring as Hyypia’s permanent successor but dropped back to assistant on the arrival of the vastly-experienced Chris Hughton, helping the club avoid relegation to League One.
However, he made no secret of the fact that he wanted another crack at management, and left for Luton in January 2016. He had early success with the Hatters, reaching the League Two play-offs in 2017 and earning automatic promotion the following season. He tried his luck with Stoke City in the Championship, but his intense and sometimes spiky management style was unable to inspire the Potters back to the Premier League and he was sacked in November 2019. But when Luton invited him back to Kenilworth Road in May 2020, he was as successful as ever, avoiding relegation and then launching a play-off push and landing the Championship’s manager of the season award in 2021-22.
It was inevitable that a Premier League club would take a chance on him sooner or later, and, because of his long history with us, many wondered if it would be the Albion after Graham Potter left for Chelsea. Instead it was Southampton, who had dismissed Ralf Hasenhuttl in November after a dismal 4-1 home defeat by Newcastle United.
His first game in charge was a respectable 3-1 defeat at Anfield. Thanks to the World Cup, he has had over a month to prepare for the visit of his old club, and the links are not lost on him. "Ironically, the first game I took charge of was Brighton at home on Boxing Day, we played Reading,” he said. “A lot of irony and coincidence about it.
“I had two spells there, five years as a player, three years as an assistant, it is a club I know well with good people who have helped me in my career. It is a club I have a real affiliation for, but one I will be desperate to beat.” We wish him good luck – but only from Tuesday on.