Nottingham Forest have engineered a scenario whereby Sean Dyche is a good Ange Postecoglou replacement through some absurd Evangelos Marinakis self-sabotage.<\/p>\n
It requires a certain character to deliberately set your own successful circus ablaze before calling in a firefighter whose current work schedule consists of launching the \u2018Utter Nonsense!\u2019 podcast and making a cameo as Kerry Katona\u2019s pretend friend on a celebrity dating reality series.<\/p>\n
And it takes a particular brand of club for that to very possibly be a significant managerial upgrade.<\/p>\n
The Premier League is a better place for Evangelos Marinakis and Nottingham Forest<\/a>. It often seems as though owner and club are not the best thing for one another\u2019s health or disposition but from the outside, they have become the engrossing car crash it is impossible not to rubber-neck.<\/p>\n It is a remarkable and delicate act of crisis-adjacent self-sabotage<\/a> to almost entirely nullify a club\u2019s most successful campaign in three decades within five months. Nottingham Forest finished seventh in the Premier League, reached the FA Cup semi-final and qualified for continental competition last season; during their first home game back in Europe since 1996 the coach who had been in place for 24 days was told by his own supporters he would be \u201csacked in the morning\u201d and there were vanishingly few remaining arguments to the contrary.<\/p>\n The lurch from Nuno Espirito Santo to Ange Postecoglou and now very possibly Sean Dyche<\/a> is whiplash-inducing. Nuno was not sacked for footballing reasons but it is absurd that having won three of his last nine Premier League games, he was replaced by someone with one victory in their last 12, who in turn could be shown the door for a coach with one win in his last 11.<\/p>\n Remarkably, Nuno has managed more career wins in European competition than both Postecoglou and Dyche combined.<\/p>\n There might be method in the madness, a course-correction of sorts. It would be an acknowledgement of a failed gamble, a shift back to the low block safety net after a mistaken tryst with a high line.<\/p>\n Nottingham Forest have placed themselves in a relegation battle and Dyche, despite having been part of two Burnley relegations before being sacked by Everton in 16th earlier this year, is as close to a known modern commodity in that scenario as anyone.<\/p>\n He also ticks the sort of box the Premier League regrettably seemed to have outgrown after the glorious madness of the 2022\/23 season<\/a>: Dyche Knows The Club. He was a Forest youth-team player in the Brian Clough years, a Nottingham resident who counts among his trusted staff Ian Woan and Steve Stone.<\/p>\n If the Postecoglou experiment is to be written off so soon, there are worse ways of eradicating these delusions of Forest grandeur. There are also better ones, sure, but Marco Silva would probably be quite expensive and Marinakis should save his entirely inevitable caretaker reign for slightly more desperate times.<\/p>\n But make no mistake: this is a full-blown identity crisis. The line in the exclusive from Sam Wallace of the Daily Telegraph<\/a> about Marinakis being \u2018understood to have considered his former manager Steve Cooper\u2019 was revealing, as close to an admission of guilt and regret as the owner is likely to come as he reboots to factory settings.<\/p>\n It does feel a little as though that story was ghost-written by a Sean D. or S. Dyche, referring as it does to how he \u2018steered\u2019 Everton \u2018through the crisis days at the end of the Farhad Moshiri era before leaving in January\u2019 as if he wasn\u2019t sacked, and how he \u2018has significant experience of keeping teams in the Premier League\u2019 as if he isn\u2019t also relatively well-versed in helping take them down.<\/p>\n