It is almost exactly two years since the former Southampton centre‑back Dejan Lovren first returned to his old stamping ground with his new club, Liverpool, and was greeted by chants of “You’re just a shit José Fonte”. Fonte was a Saints idol back then, a model stalwart who helped marshal the club’s rise from League One to the Premier League. But on Saturday he, too, will return to St Mary’s as an opponent following his acrimonious defection to West Ham in January. How will he be greeted? Will he be told he is just a poor version of his younger self?
“It’s a really difficult one to read,” says Steve Grant, the owner of the Southampton supporters’ site SaintsWeb.co.uk. “There’s obviously no doubt that he was a superb player for us but the manner of his departure seems to have put a lot of people’s noses out of joint. As a result I suspect the reception he will get will be quite frosty, though I kind of hope it isn’t.”
By “the manner of his departure” Grant is referring not merely to the fact that Fonte could not reach agreement with Southampton over a new contract before accepting a presumably better offer from West Ham but also to the perception that Fonte’s attitude towards the club he captained seemed to change last summer, when he became a European champion with Portugal and the subject of transfer rumours linking him to Manchester United.
“Whether there was anything in that I don’t know but it did seem as if he was in a constant sulk in the first half of this season,” Grant says. “It was just the way he conducted himself on the pitch, there was a distinct change in his body language. Whether that was an ‘I’m unhappy to be here’ stance I’m not entirely sure but it was definitely different.”
Supporters consider much when deciding how to handle encounters with old flames; and scenarios differ. Fonte’s case is not the same, for example, as that of Saido Berahino, the former West Bromwich Albion striker who will return to The Hawthorns with Stoke City on Saturday.
Fonte gave Southampton seven years of service before agitating for a move at the age of 33; Berahino had one brilliant season before appearing to get ideas above West Brom’s station.
So which is a harder loss to accept – the one of the veteran who once seemed unshakeably staunch in his commitment to the club or the one of the youngster whose focus fell into question before he fulfilled his potential? “I think it’s a sad situation what happened with Saido,” says Dawn Astle, a West Brom supporter and the daughter of the club’s former striker Jeff Astle, known as the King to Baggies fans because of a decade of goalscoring for them.
“We don’t know the exact story of what happened between [Berahino] and the club over the last 18 months or so but the headlines this week [about Berahino’s ban in September for use of a recreational drug] have definitely rubbed salt into wounds.
“When he’s on form he’s a class act but I think the vast majority of supporters will boo when his name is read out on Saturday. I won’t because I don’t do that but I think most will. And if he scores against us and starts clutching the Stoke badge or something, he could get a hell of a lot of stick.”
Mind you, at least Stoke are not West Brom’s fiercest rivals. “If he was coming back to play against us with Villa or Wolves, it wouldn’t matter if he’d scored 9,000 goals for us, he’d get terrible stick.” Similarly West Ham are not sworn enemies of Southampton, so Fonte is unlikely to suffer the sort of abuse that, say, Sol Campbell endured after swapping Tottenham for Arsenal in 2001 or Matty Taylor has been contending with this week after becoming the first player in 30 years to leave Bristol Rovers for Bristol City.
The last person to attract enmity of comparable levels on the south coast was Harry Redknapp, who quit Portsmouth to manage Southampton in 2002 – and then did the opposite a year later. “It was blatantly obvious that he had never really wanted to be with us in the first place and I think Redknapp is more or less universally hated by Southampton fans,” says Grant. “But of all the players who’ve left and returned to Southampton in recent years I think Lovren gets the worst reception.
“In a way that’s weird because we always knew he was a mercenary because of the way he left Lyon to join us in the first place. But he gets it worse than Adam Lallana even though Lallana, like Fonte, was the captain when he let it be known he wanted to leave. Lallana seems to be able to block out the boos, whereas it seems to really affect Lovren when he plays against us. Which probably means it won’t stop for him.
“Personally, though, I struggle to get that worked up about comeback players because there are so many of them now I wouldn’t have the energy.”