Hot off the press in the last few minutes is a story that Mark Hughes is about to be replaced by a club legend, but it is not who you would think !
In the last half hour Talksport, in fairness not the most reliable of media outlets has made a wild claim that Kelvin Davis is being lined up to replace Mark Hughes as manager.
"Southampton bosses are paving the way to replace under-fire manager Mark Hughes with club legend Kelvin Davies, talkSPORT has been told."
The Radio Station are making that claim after speaking to their "South Coast Correspondent" Alex Crook, a local journalist who has been with Portsmouth based news agency M & Y and over the years he has been renowned for some incredulous claims.
Crook is quoted on the Talksport website as saying (Sic).
"He’s not a household name outside of St Mary’s, but Kelvin Davies has just started to become a bit more active on the touchline in the last couple of matches.
"Davies is a club legend, he played over 300 games and was part of the team that led Southampton from League One into the Premier League."
"It’s my understanding that is a direct instruction from Ralph Krueger, the chairman who is now very much in charge of the day-to-day running of the club, he wants him to play a much more active role.
"I’m not sure that’s going to sit particularly comfortably with Mark Hughes."
"Throughout his managerial career, Hughes has always had a very close-knit coaching staff, and suddenly he’s had someone thrusted on him who he doesn’t necessarily want to use, and that would probably undermine his position."
"It wouldn’t surprise me, Certainly in the short term, that if Mark Hughes does lose his job Kelvin Davies and Radhi Jaidi, another former player who is currently in charge of the Under-23s, would get the job on a caretaker basis.”
In short this seems to be a story to stir up headlines, as mentioned in an earlier piece Davis if Hughes left would be the only coach left with any First team coaching experience, but that coaching experience is very limited as he was only appointed last December and previous to that had spent a year in a non coaching role at the club.
As normal Talksport fire out a headline which actually is not what it seems, although they initially claim that Davis or Davies as they continually refer to him as is being lined up to replace Hughes, it is clearly taking any comment that Krueger might have made to Crook totally out of context.
Indeed Davis would be unlikely to have the coaching badges needed to take over on a full time basis and as he was appointed to the coaching staff it would be natural to think he would be being groomed to perhaps eventually take over the hot seat, but not for a while yet.
So we can take this rumour with a pinch of salt and see it as no more than mischief making.