Nahki Wells and Huddersfield Town endured a nightmare start to the Sky Bet Championship on Saturday, losing 4-0 at home to Bournemouth in a performance that cost Mark Robins his job as manager.

The first dismissal of the new season in England, which comes even before a ball has been kicked in the fickle world of the Barclays Premier League, was announced this morning with Huddersfield supporters still hung over from what had been the worst of home openers.

More significantly for Wells, the Bermuda striker, he must now pick up the pieces from a chastening day at the John Smith’s Stadium without the man who gave him his big break in English football’s second tier in January, when he signed him from Bradford City for a club-record £1.5 million.

Huddersfield’s poor finish to 2013-14, in which they took only ten points from a possible 39 after thrashing Barnsley 5-0 on March 1, left Robins as a candidate to win the sack race, but no one could anticipate how swift the axe would fall on the former Manchester United and Norwich City forward.

The bottom began to fall out well inside the first minute of the opening kick-off when Mark Pugh found his way behind the Huddersfield defence to score after 24 seconds. Callum Wilson made it 2-0 just after the half-hour, at which point large sections of the home support among a crowd of 12,371 questioned vociferously whether Robins knew what he was doing.

They, and the board, got their answer after half-time when the rout continued, with Yann Kermorgant getting on the scoresheet and Wilson hitting his second. The only highlight for Huddersfield was the sight of Alex Smithies saving a 75th-minute penalty to deny Wilson a hat-trick. But the embarrassment was no less absolute and Robins virtually handed in his resignation during his post-game press conference.

“It was an absolute disgrace,” he said. “We switched off and didn’t play with any idea. It looked like we hadn’t done anything all summer, or that we’d been wasting our time. That’s really disappointing to me because we worked really hard over the summer to put something together and we believe in what we’re doing. I feel let down today.

“It is the manner in which we lost today that is most disappointing. We created very few chances. It was as poor a start as we could have had. Our season has to start on Tuesday night [away to Chesterfield in the Capital One Cup] because it hasn’t started yet.”

But tomorrow’s cup-tie will go on without the manager, with Steve Thompson, the assistant manager, and Steve Eyre, the first-team coach, put in charge of team affairs while the club cast their net for a replacement.

Wells, who endured a difficult time against the Bournemouth defence, was almost absolved of criticism when the Huddersfield Examiner produced its player ratings, the striker having been said to have “worked his socks off” in an ineffectual partnership with Danny Ward.

However, the 3-5-2 system that Robins has employed to entertain the Huddersfield fans, especially at home, backfired spectacularly as Bournemouth got at a shaky defence repeatedly. It has not helped also that bearded midfielder Adam Clayton, the crowd favourite and last season’s player of the year, was unavailable because of an impending move to Middlesbrough.

“In the end, the personnel decide games and that comes down to their willingness to work, not systems,” Robins added in what can now be viewed as a blueprint for the future. “A lot of teams will play 3-5-2 and we want to make that work, but the players dictate what we do in the end.”