Jan Poortvliet is no longer head coach at Southampton Football Club with immediate effect.
A short simple statement on the official webiste on Friday night announced that Jan Poortvliet had stepped down as head coach with immediate effect and that Mark Wotte would take over as head coach starting with the game at Norwich City.
But as usual with Saints nothing is quite as it seems, firstly Poortvliet seemed to have survived a crisis meeting on Tuesday after which he had been upbeat with the local press throughout the week, so why wasnt he sacked at this meeting, the logical time to do it to give Wotte a full week to work with the team as opposed to one day ?
The answer could be that Wotte isnt anything but a stop gap, on Tuesday Lowe had no plan B, by Friday evening he did !
But if that plan B was Wotte, surely a short phone call would have agreed the actions needed to be taken and the axe could have been wielded, those cynics and long term Lowe watchers amongst us, know that Lowe will only make such a drastic move when he has things in motion, on Tuesday on his return from"Holiday" he didnt, today he might well have, a good outside bet would be Glenn Hoddle, it would suit Lowe to see Hoddle succeed so that he could remind fans about five years ago and what he sees as the consequence of the failure to bring back Hoddle due to fan pressure.
My guess is that there is something more in the pipeline, Lowe has got the sacking out of the way on a Friday giving him a full weekend to let the storm die down.
As for Poortvliet, history will judge him harshly, however he was a decent man who was perhaps out of his depth, however i would contend that in the circumstances he did a reasonable job in the fact that he took over a squad where most of the experienced players had left and he had to rebuild using kids, would anyone else have done any better ? Perhaps we will now find out.