Reply With QuoteFrom this list:
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I was listening to the radio on the way home and the way the the Mansfield commentators and Clough were going on, you'd think Doncaster were prime Barcelona and a point at home to them was a great result, no one mentioned that a few days earlier Doncaster got a hammeringOriginally Posted by i961pie
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From this list:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...eague_managers
Can sort by date of starting or by league
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Nuno has had a good start. Lost to Bournemouth in added time after playing with 10 after a terrible refs decision then beat Newcastle away and Man Utd at home.
I think he's probably a good fit there, although he has the stuff you mentioned to overcome.
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Maurice Ross (that seems a long time ago now) appointed Assistant Coach at Fleetwood with Charlie Adam as Head Coach.
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Enzio as first signing
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The Athletic article cited in earlier posts, good read, I’ve had to put it in three posts as it’s that long!
Inside Steve Cooper’s Nottingham Forest exit: How the love story fell apart
Daniel Taylor
Dec 20, 2023
This was always going to be a challenging season for Steve Cooper and, even before a ball was kicked in anger, he was beginning to wonder whether everyone at Nottingham Forest understood the importance he placed upon respect and togetherness.
In June, the club held a pre-season kit launch for fans, sponsors and assorted guests at Nottingham Castle.
It was a big event for Forest, the first time they had tried anything so ambitious, and Cooper agreed to make an appearance with some first-team players. Danilo, the Brazilian midfielder, made himself available. Taiwo Awoniyi was there and Joe Worrall, the captain, volunteered as a late stand-in after Brennan Johnson had to pull out.
Nicholas Randall, then the chairman, was also there and gave a speech in which he started by making a reference to what Cooper was wearing. Cooper was able to laugh that off but the manager was furious when Randall used Worrall as the target for a cheap joke.
Worrall, Randall explained, had spent part of his childhood wanting to be a professional cricketer. The punchline had words to the effect of, “And halfway through last season, we all wished he had been a professional cricketer, too.”
Worrall, whose form had been patchy, was unimpressed, to say the least. Cooper thought his captain had been publicly humiliated and saw it as a kick in the teeth for himself, the player and all his coaching staff when a huge part of their job involved keeping everyone feeling upbeat and confident.
Randall’s comments went down so badly that there were people at the club who talked about not wanting him on the same plane as the players for a pre-season fixture against Eintracht Frankfurt. In the end, he was informed there were not enough seats on the flight to Germany.
Unfortunately for Cooper, there has been too much conflict since the euphoria of promotion two summers ago and, ultimately, his grievance with Randall was just a subplot to the real story: his inability to please Evangelos Marinakis, the club’s owner, by taking Forest higher up the league.
It ended yesterday with Cooper’s sacking, having found out the former Wolves and Tottenham manager Nuno Espirito Santo was flying in to take his job, and a statement from Forest that, if nothing else, showed more warmth than had been the case for some of the previous managers to be sacked in the Marinakis era.
In his last moments at the club, Cooper went into the boardroom to see Marinakis during an afternoon when it was carefully arranged that the outgoing manager would not bump into his replacement. Cooper, who had been given the news by chief football officer Ross Wilson, refused to be sour about it and his farewell conversation with Marinakis was amicable. The two men shook hands and, when Cooper releases a statement to thank for the club for some wonderful times, he will take the diplomatic stance of including the owner in his tributes. It is important to Cooper to remain classy to the end.
The truth, however, is that his relationship with Marinakis started to unravel a long time ago and that, until this final act of rapprochement, there have been all sorts of issues that have been, for the most part, kept away from the club’s supporters.
Attitudes had hardened, on both sides, and it had become such an open secret within the industry that Leeds United, relegated from the Premier League last season, seriously considered making an approach for Cooper in the summer. Even in the Championship, there were people at Elland Road who thought it worth asking the question, speculatively or not, just to see where it got them.
More recently, Crystal Palace have been monitoring Cooper’s position as a possible replacement for Roy Hodgson, the current manager. As a measure of how relations have changed, Forest had suspected for some time that Cooper was open to the idea, not least because he was also fully aware that his own club were eyeing up managers behind his back. As sad as these moments are, Cooper was not entirely despondent, in one sense, that his relationship with Marinakis — a long, complex and occasionally hostile standoff — was drawing to an end.
Cooper's final days at Forest: The wait, the news and the reaction
That will leave many Forest supporters with conflicting emotions given that the two men have, between them, conjured up the happiest times at the City Ground since the turn of the century.
On the one hand, the fans’ affinity to Cooper could be gauged by the remarkable support that was shown to him during the recent 13-match sequence when Forest won only once and fell to 17th in the Premier League table, leaving them five points above the relegation zone.
On the other hand, those fans are also grateful, in the extreme, for the financial backing from Marinakis and have come to appreciate that, at the heart of everything he does, there is a determination from the Greek shipping magnate to keep the club on an upward trajectory.
His methods can be unorthodox sometimes and anyone who has followed the story of Olympiacos — conspiracies, riots, near-unremitting drama and an official statement recently claiming Greek football was run by a mafia — will know how wild it can be inside the Piraeus-based club, where Marinakis recently appointed his sixth head coach in 16 months.
To a generation of Forest supporters, however, the good has far outweighed the bad since Marinakis took control from Fawaz al Hasawi in 2017 and bought a stagnating club that had little in its favour other than the comfort blanket of nostalgia.
Marinakis has deep pockets, big ambitions and a level of commitment that will always be appreciated by a fanbase that had, until Cooper’s appointment, spent almost a quarter of the century outside the top division.
And yet, there was also a thick portfolio of evidence that Cooper’s popularity with the fans troubled and, at times, irked the owner.
Marinakis did not believe Cooper had done enough during these past 18 months as a Premier League club to warrant the songs of adulation, the favourable headlines and the absence of any real criticism. It was not what he would have expected from the fans of a Greek club fighting relegation. And it was not the culture he wanted at Forest, either.
Cooper strayed dangerously close to being sacked after a 4-0 defeat to Leicester City in the October of last season and, again, when his team were beaten 2-1 at Leeds in early April. One member of Forest’s entourage described Cooper to the Leeds directors as a “dead man walking.”
Instead, Marinakis decided to stick with him. He was widely praised as a result and, in a television interview at the end of the season, congratulated himself on a “wise” decision. But he was also candid enough to acknowledge he had not been able to find anyone who was a) better and b) available. “There have been many dialogues,” he said of his relationship with Cooper, “sometimes good, sometimes bad.”
That pattern continued this season and, unfortunately for Cooper, it had been apparent for some time that his position was going to be under scrutiny whenever the team had a difficult patch.
In the early weeks of the season, he and Marinakis talked about some of their differences and came away with a mutual understanding that they could still be good for one another. Since then, however, their relationship spiralled again. In the last two months, it had been particularly distant and fractious.
Many people with knowledge of the situation were surprised, if anything, that Cooper lasted as long as he did.
Over the past 18 months, information had also got back to Cooper, more than once, that stories had been planted in the media with the apparent intention of shifting fan opinion and undermining his popularity. When Marinakis had been angry with certain performances or the manager’s tactics, it had often found its way into the media. Cooper felt he was being undermined at a time when the club needed to show solidarity.
The idea of Cooper encountering those issues might seem unthinkable given his successes at the club, inheriting a team that had spent 35 days at the bottom of the Championship, then winning an almost implausible promotion and keeping them in the Premier League last season while favourites to be relegated. Over time, however, it had also become apparent that some of the people running the club thought the praise for the Welshman went over the top.
The club could never be accused of being the same. Many supporters wondered why Forest’s social media channels often refrained from joining in with the acclaim for Cooper.
The people who understand Marinakis best say he wants to change the mindset of Nottingham as a football city. He wants an attitude that correlates more with Olympiacos, Greek champions a record 47 times, where there is an expectation of success every season and a mentality, for the most part, that anything else is unacceptable.
Last season, Forest broke all sorts of records by making an unprecedented 29 signings, spending more on transfer fees in one summer than they had previously throughout 157 years of existence. A new signing arrived, on average, every four days. Forest spent more that summer — upwards of £150million — than Barcelona, Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain.
This summer, another 13 players arrived, including seven on the final day of transfer business before the deadline. It was further confirmation of Forest’s status as the most prolific buyers in English football and, three days later, Marinakis set out the aim to “achieve greatness” in an open letter published on the club’s website.
Last edited by keldsyke; 31-12-2023 at 04:20 PM.
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“The breathless excitement of transfer deadline day saw Nottingham Forest dominate the rolling sports coverage,” he wrote. “Our vision for the club is clear and unwavering: we are on a path to re-establish Nottingham Forest as a dominant force in English football.”
Against that kind of backdrop, it becomes easier to understand why he could not tolerate the idea of Forest being just a place above the relegation zone.
There were, however, mitigating circumstances for Cooper, given the obvious difficulties of having to bring together a new, experimental squad and find a winning formula while losing key players to injuries and not having enough room to accommodate all the signings. A number of players arrived without Cooper having much input and, though that left him thinking the squad was unbalanced, he understood that was how the operation worked and did his best to make some of the more unexpected buys feel at home.
Miltiadis, the 24-year-old son of Marinakis, is the club’s second-in-command as well as being the de facto sporting director, tracking targets and speaking to agents. His father always has the final say, though. And, financially, nobody could ever say that Marinakis Senior has not provided a level of backing to put Forest back on the map.
Two framed pictures inside the club’s media suite were replaced at the start of the season with photographs showing Miltiadis. He, like his dad, wants to be associated with a successful team. Miltiadis even took it upon himself to deliver a speech to the players in between the recent 5-0 defeat at Fulham and 1-1 draw at Wolves. In their private conversations, he and his father would challenge Cooper’s views on tactics and never wavered from the view that it was their right to tell him where they thought he was going wrong.
Expectations have gone up and, to give Marinakis his due, this is one of the reasons why the fans are largely appreciative of his presence. He is always wanting more. If Nuno makes Forest a top-10 team, pressure will immediately be applied to make that top six. And if that doesn’t happen, he will also be vulnerable to the sack. This is just the nature of the beast. It is preferable, most Forest fans would agree, to what they had before, when Al Hasawi’s ownership of the club became known as the Carry on Kuwait era.
On another level, however, there have to be legitimate questions about whether Forest’s hierarchy offers the right levels of emotional support and understands the benefits of building closer relations with key personnel.
Too many people leave Forest talking about what can be, too often, a hard-faced working environment and the near desperation to keep the Greek regime happy, avoiding the huge explosions of temper, the angry WhatsApp messages and the kind of unpleasantness that led to Aitor Karanka, one of Cooper’s predecessors, resigning because he felt worn down by the politics and occasional hostilities.
Marinakis was so incensed by the recent 5-0 defeat at Fulham that he stormed out of Craven Cottage at the 70-minute mark, throwing his lanyard into the garden of a house near the stadium.
It can be a tough, volatile place to work and Cooper is far from alone when it comes to the list of people who have left in difficult circumstances since the club returned to the Premier League.
Dane Murphy, the chief executive who appointed Cooper, had to bring in lawyers when he was allegedly not paid his promotion bonuses. Stories were subsequently leaked that Murphy’s job was in danger — and he was gone within a few months. Forest state it was not related to his legal issue.
Randall, who had been chairman since the start of the Marinakis era, was heavily involved in the process that led to Gary Brazil, Forest’s academy chief, leaving in June.
Brazil, who has since taken a prominent job with the English Football Association, has been described as wounded by his treatment, having set up the production line of young footballers that had made the club many millions of pounds over the previous decade.
In an unrelated move, Marinakis decided in August it was time to appoint a new chairman. He was dissatisfied with Randall for a number of reasons and, though he was kept on as a non-executive director, there was a run of games in October and November when Randall did not even have a place in the boardroom.
Life at Forest is never dull: visitors to the City Ground one day in August were surprised to find a window had been broken inside the main entrance. The explanation was that Forest had been sprucing up that part of the Peter Taylor stand among a series of improvements, all financed by Marinakis, before a full redevelopment in the next few years. The club wanted everything looking perfect for their first home game of the season. But something had displeased them. It isn’t clear what happened next, other than a window ended up being broken. “Nobody got killed,” as Roy Keane might say. Even so, these are not the kind of events that visitors to a football club would usually expect to encounter.
With Cooper, however, it did come back to results and Marinakis would have been happy to continue as they were if the team were higher up the table.
Questions were asked about his team selections, his substitutions and the money spent on some of the players — Andre Ayew, Jonjo Shelvey and Chris Wood — Cooper had requested in last season’s January transfer window. Shelvey turned out to be a calamitous signing, falling out with Cooper, then being marginalised and now on a season’s loan at Turkish club Caykur Rizespor, with Forest paying the bulk of his £75,000 weekly wage.
Cooper had a fallout recently with Worrall and the captain had not always been part of first-team training when it came to match preparations. Another defender, Scott McKenna, was also ostracised because of a contract dispute that had left Cooper, in agreement with Marinakis, questioning the player’s priorities.
None of this was a particular concern for Cooper’s employers, other than the impact it might have on potential transfer fees for the two players in January. But the people at the top will always challenge and scrutinise a manager’s decisions and, at times, Cooper was irritated by their apparent belief that they knew better than him.
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One story came out recently that Marinakis was particularly unhappy about the team’s record at set pieces. An approach had been made to Gianni Vio, an Italian set-piece specialist who was at Tottenham Hotspur during Antonio Conte’s time as manager. Everything was virtually agreed. Cooper, however, did not share the enthusiasm for Vio and the arrangement was abandoned. Instead, Forest filled the role by hiring Simon Rusk, the England Under-19s coach, last week and that again demonstrates the unorthodox way the club is run. Rusk was Cooper’s pick, even though Forest were actively looking to replace him as manager.
When Forest beat Arsenal 1-0 in May to ensure their Premier League status for another year, it was a time of great celebration inside a stadium that had grown remarkably fond of Cooper’s celebratory fist-pumps.
Yet the body language of both manager and owner was awkward, to say the least, as they came together on the pitch.
That day, there were allies of Cooper saying he should take a pay-off, shake hands and leave Forest on a high note rather than subject himself to any more internal criticism. They were angry about what they saw as a lack of gratitude at the top of the club. Their concern all along was that other managers were being sounded out for his job.
The following weekend, Forest went to Crystal Palace for their final match of the season and a piece of footage from Twitter (now X) was brought to the attention of club officials.
Again, it was an awkward exchange between Cooper and Marinakis as they applauded the Forest fans at the end of the game. Cooper could then be seen turning to Wayne Hennessey, his substitute goalkeeper, and saying something that, to an amateur lip-reader, might have looked like a derogatory comment about Marinakis. He had not done anything of the sort — it was a complete fallacy — but the fact it was even considered to be a possibility showed how relations had deteriorated.
One certainty is that Cooper will not be short of offers, with a managerial CV that includes winning the Under-17 World Cup with England and back-to-back seasons when Swansea City reached the Championship play-offs, getting to the final in the second of them.
He was interviewed for the Palace job before Patrick Vieira’s appointment in the summer of 2021 and various clubs – Everton, Wolves and Southampton, among them – have, at one time or another, been monitoring his position at Forest.
Cooper, however, preferred to stay where he was, acutely aware he may never have a closer bond with a club’s supporters throughout the rest of his career. He had a deep and genuine affinity with Forest, even if it was tested at times, and felt a heavy duty of responsibility to make it work for the people who had made him and his family so welcome.
Before every home game, you could see from the way he looked around him, especially during the pre-match rendition of “Mull of Kintyre”, what it meant to him. His match-day attire was always Paul Smith, the Nottingham-born fashion designer. Cooper called the City Ground a “magical place” with “football soul.”
His parents, Keith and Jill, would regularly make the three-hour drive from their home in south Wales to Nottingham. “It’s a special club, isn’t it?,” Jill told The Athletic before that Championship play-off final last year.“I still remember the first time I heard the crowd chanting Steve’s name. Oh gosh, it was just wonderful. And he loves Nottingham Forest.”
The bottom line, however, is that Cooper failed to meet the requirements of the Greek billionaire who stood on the balcony of Nottingham Council House, on the day after Forest had won that promotion, and picked up a microphone to tell the crowd they should prepare for a new era of silverware.
“As of today, we are aiming to rewrite history and win more trophies,” said Marinakis. “This is only the beginning.”
That is the challenge for Nuno, whose first game will come against Bournemouth on Saturday. But there will inevitably be other challenges, too, because that is just part of everyday life at modern-day Nottingham Forest, and the people at the top of the club make no apologies for it.
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Interestingly, Eric Ramsay is the new hot favourite (2/5) for the Swansea job according to BV with LW drifting to 2/1
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Didn't his name come up a few times before we got LW?
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