Football can be a strange game. Even successful managers can be vulnerable to mercurial owners, particularly when those owners enjoy popularity with fans because of the way they have turned a club around.
Some consider that the crisis at Nottingham Forest has been overblown by the media and will get settled one way or another, amicably or not. Certainly there is a sense in which it is open season or having a go at Forest.
Nevertheless, is there any way to fix this mess, given that Nuno’s working relationship with Edu, the newly appointed global head of football for Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis’ multi-club empire, has got off to such an alarmingly bad start
Nuno offered a glimpse into his own mindset before the 1-1 draw away to Crystal Palace on Sunday, when he confirmed he wanted to continue as Forest’s coach — some reports had questioned whether he was trying to engineer his own sacking — but accepted the three relevant people needed to get together to work this out.?
Yet Nuno, by his own admission, accepts that his job is in danger and admitted last week — “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” – that he suspected there was something in the reports that Marinakis was considering sacking him. So, is he really enjoying it?
“Of course, the situation has to be solved,” he said. “We are responsible people and we are going to have a good conversation to try, more than anything, to create a good platform for what is most important — the team.”
The strange thing, perhaps, was when Nuno went on to say he was willing to wait. If you thought he might want these talks to happen straight away, that would be wrong. Instead, he talked about the priority for Forest being to bring in three more signings — a goalkeeper and two full-backs — ahead of the transfer window closing next Monday, September 1.
The bond between Nuno and his team is a close one and, as he acknowledged, over the past few days there has been a lot of understandable confusion for those players.
Sunday’s draw, secured by Callum Hudson-Odoi’s second-half equaliser, took place amid a backdrop of reports stating that Brendan Rodgers, the Celtic manager, or Ange Postecoglou, fired by Tottenham Hotspur earlier this summer, were in the running to replace him. Who could be surprised if the mood in the dressing room had been more subdued than usual?
There was also a sense of unease among some of the away fans – and perhaps also an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu, given the uncertainty around Nuno is not the first time they have had to endure this kind of turbulence in the eight-year Marinakis era.But then there are evident pluses from his reign.
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