Ange Postecoglou Is the New Nottingham Forest Manager. Is He Doomed From the Start?

As another dreary international break comes to a close, and top-flight league action resumes again, spare a thought for Nuno Espírito Santo. The man with the holiest name in football was unceremoniously dumped by Nottingham Forest this week, and it would have taken divine intervention to keep him in the job, such was the discord between the ousted manager and the club’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis.

Nuno performed a minor miracle at Forest last season, taking them to an unexpected seventh place in the English Premier League (EPL). Even though they missed out on a Champions League spot on the final day, Forest still qualified for European competition for the first time in almost three decades. Nuno found a way to get the best out of unfashionable players like towering New Zealand marksman Chris Wood, scorer of 20 league goals, and the trio of Anthony Elanga, Callum Hudson-Odoi, and Morgan Gibbs-White, underappreciated at bigger clubs but finding form in the Midlands.

Everything was looking rosy around the City Ground heading into the new season, then, but Nuno, dismayed at the slowness of Forest’s transfer dealings, made a fatal error: speaking out publicly against Marinakis, the absolute last owner in the entirety of England who’d take such a thing well. 

Marinakis — indomitable and intimidating, who once confidently strode across the pitch at a fiery Panathinaikos vs. Olympiacos (he owns the latter Greek club as well as Forest) derby — is a man who likes to be in control; a subordinate like Nuno questioning him in the media was always going to backfire on the Portuguese coach. (That Nuno reportedly also had difficulties with Forest’s new global sporting director Edu certainly didn’t help matters, but his departure was Marinakis’ call. Cross the don and see what happens.)

Image: Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis reacts during the EPL game between Nottingham Forest and West Ham Credit: Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images

While fans tried to find something of interest during the international break, Forest quietly confirmed Nuno’s firing with an early morning statement on Tuesday. There would be no City Ground farewell, no amicable break-up; guiding a club to its best season since the ‘90s doesn’t get you much these days. 

What might leave an even more sour taste in Nuno’s mouth is how quickly his replacement was found. 

Less than 24 hours later Ange Postecoglou was announced as the new Forest manager, marking his return to English football after being sacked by Tottenham Hotspur at the end of last season. 

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If Nuno was a suspicious man (and, being a manager in one of the most volatile leagues in Europe, who could blame him?), he’d look at Marinakis and Postecoglou’s personal history and wonder if his fate at Forest was decided long before this week.

The pair were together in July when Marinakis, president of Greece’s Super League, presented the Greek-born, Melbourne-raised Postecoglou with an award for becoming the first coach from the country to win a major European club trophy, following his famous Europa League win with Spurs. 

“What he achieved, he did with a team that has not won any titles – it has had a very difficult time in recent years,” Marinakis said in admiration at the time. “In this huge success that the whole world saw, he promoted Greece. We must thank him especially for this and we wish him well, although we are sure that he will do well as he has the ability. Wherever he goes, the successes will come.”

“Wherever he goes,” it turns out, is into the heart of Marinakis’ world, right under his menacing gaze. Challenges now lie ahead, both on and off the pitch. Postecoglou has had to deal with difficult bosses of varying degrees at his previous clubs, from Celtic’s weak-willed and effete boardroom to Spurs’ former executive chairman Daniel Levy’s authoritative style, but Marinakis, no matter their Greek connection, represents a different proposition entirely. 

This is the man who once stormed the pitch at the final whistle of a game, remonstrating with Nuno in front of the cameras; this is the man who would not accept Gibbs-White leaving during this summer transfer window, appearing in an interview with his star player after ‘convincing’ him to sign a new contract that made terrorist hostage videos look convivial in comparison. 

In the forthright Postecoglou, he’ll encounter someone similar to him in many ways, which could turn out to be either a positive or a negative. Both men are obdurate to a fault, whether it’s in transfer dealings (Marinakis) or with footballing principles (Postecoglou), and both men absolutely live for football. Perhaps, in recognising something of himself in his new manager, Marinakis will allow Postecoglou to speak his mind more than the meek Nuno. Because the new man in charge will not be afraid to speak his mind. 

Onto the pitch: Postecoglou inherits a squad capable of going on a deep run into the latter stages of the Europa League, which is likely Marinakis’ demand of him. Nuno might have been upset at the speed of Forest’s transfer business over the past few months, but the club still finished with an impressive outlay of £180M on over 10 new players. 

From Brazil, the talented Botafogo pair of Igor Jesus and Jair Cunha will be looking to impress; English attacking midfielders Omari Hutchinson and James McAtee add flair and pace; loan arrivals Oleksandr Zinchenko and Douglas Luiz boast plentiful EPL experience. The players already present from last season are exceptional too, chief among them Elliot Anderson, England’s standout from this most recent international break, a ball-playing midfielder with incisive vision and box-to-box tenacity. And it might have been achieved with a complete lack of grace and subtlety, but Forest retaining the services of Gibbs-White is a serious statement — Marinakis clearly wants his club to better last season’s performance. (The loss of defender Ola Aina, however, due to an injury picked up while in action for Nigeria, is a major blow.)

Forest’s players, old and new, will have to quickly adapt to a dramatically different style of play.

Gone is the safe, timid counter-attacking of Nuno, in its place Postecoglou’s wildly attacking football, with its intense pressing, and — suicidally or swaggeringly, depending on who you ask — high defensive line. (It’s time for a disclaimer: this writer is a devout Celtic fan, who watched Postecoglou bring the most attractive, attacking brand of football to his club since the late, great Tommy Burns’ unlucky losers of the mid-’90s, or, going even further back, Jock Stein’s immortal 1967 Lisbon Lions.)

Forest players are already noticing little differences. Postecoglou took charge of his first training session as head coach on Tuesday, and Hudson-Odoi told talkSPORT afterwards that the Australian had put on an intense initial session. 

Image: Ange Postecoglou takes charge of his first training session as Nottingham Forest head coach Credit: Ritchie Sumpter/Nottingham Forest FC via Getty Images

“Yeah that was a session! I can’t even lie to you,” he revealed. “For us, it’s building that relationship with him early and getting ideas of what he wants to bring into the team.” (It should be noted that Hudson-Odoi also had kind words for his former manager, admitting he was “very close” with Nuno.)

Postecoglou’s football, dubbed ‘Angeball’, is high on entertainment and high on risk, and it demands a lot from his players. During his first week of training sessions at Celtic, a clip went viral of Postecoglou shouting “we never stop, we never stop. We’ll stop at half-time, and then at the end of the game when we celebrate. But during the game we don’t stop”; it’s a mantra that would come to define his time at Scotland’s most successful club. (Watch any game footage from Postecoglou’s time at Celtic and you’ll see players giving everything on the pitch for him, relentlessly hunting opposition players in possession, led by the imposingly energetic Japanese forward Daizen Maeda.)

Statistics from last season provide a different picture of Ange the Stubborn. 

Yes, Spurs conceded a woeful 65 goals in the league last season, with only Wolves and the trio of relegated teams conceding more, but Postecoglou did change his philosophy, even just slightly, towards the conclusion of the season. 

Spurs went from being a team with one of the highest percentage numbers in the EPL to not having more than 42% of possession in the final four games of their Europa League run. Just look at the stats from their scrappy 1-0 win over Manchester United in the final: Spurs had 26.7% possession to their rivals’ 73.3%, and just one shot on target compared to United’s six. Those figures would make Jose Mourinho or Helenio Herrera proud, and certainly do not reflect the general perception of ‘Angeball’. 

Postecoglou will need to be afforded the necessary time to implement his vastly different style, which could be detrimental to league form, at least at the beginning. It probably won’t ever be admitted publicly, but Marinakis might not mind sacrificing a top-half league finish if it enhances the possibility of lifting a European trophy. The owner will want silverware sooner rather than later, though, which would go against Postecoglou’s iconic line: “I don’t usually win things, I always win things in my second year.” Postecoglou has already openly addressed the prospect of finding success at Forest, telling the media this week that “[t]he joy for me coming to this club is to win a trophy here, not because it’s going to help me keep my job [but] because I know how it’s going to make people feel.”

How will Forest fans take to their new manager? On the surface, replacing someone who took a club from 17th to 7th (Nuno) with someone who took a club in the completely opposite direction (Postecoglou; 5th to 17th) seems misguided, but look a little deeper: only one of these managers is a serial winner. 

All a Forest fan has to do is ask any Spurs supporter one simple question: would they have traded their Europa League win, which ended a near-two-decade trophy drought, for a top six finish last season? Only the most servile, EPL-minded supporter would answer yes.

Postecoglou has quickly endeared himself to the fans of every club he’s managed, and he should similarly win over Forest fans, still reeling from Nuno’s sudden demise, in no time.

Because — and whisper this — there’s something of Forest’s legendary manager Brian Clough, the man who guided the club to two historic, frankly ridiculous European Cup wins in the late ‘70s, about Postecoglou, in his unwavering self-belief and cultish charisma. He already spoke fondly of Clough, citing him as an inspiration growing up in Australia, saying “I loved the legendary figures of the game; it is what inspired me to be a manager. People like Bill Shankly, Jock Stein, then you get somebody like Brian Clough … I knew that team, how they played and to see a club like Nottingham Forest win two European Cups was incredible.”

Forest currently sit 10th in the table after suffering a dire 3-0 home defeat by West Ham before the international break, and there will be no easing back into league action: first up for Postecoglou and his new club is a trip to — where else? — Arsenal, his fierce foe while at Spurs, which will be available for Aussies to watch on Stan Sport from 9pm AEST today (September 13th). 

Facing such a stern test in his first game in charge, however, is the sort of game the bullish Postecoglou will relish.

“I don’t see it as a point to prove. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone,” he said after being announced as Forest’s new manager. “I do like my teams to play exciting football and score goals and get fans excited. I make no apologies about that, that’s just the way I am.”