Where there's smoke, there tends to be a fired manager, and so it was no surprise that Nottingham Forest announced on Monday that it had parted ways with Nuno Espírito Santo. Following Forest's 3-0 drubbing at West Ham on Aug. 31, ahead of the first international break of the season, the club decided to sack the manager who led last season's stunning success. Of course, as avid readers of Defector might already know, the on-field results were secondary to Nuno's fate, and it was really his public feud with both owner Evangelos Marinakis and Global Head of Football Edu that sealed it.
I've covered the mess at the City Ground before, but a quick refresher: Nuno propelled Forest to seventh in the table last season, and perhaps expected commensurate support in the transfer market this summer. When he felt he did not get it, he opined quite publicly about his disappointment with the recruiting, and things spiraled from there. Edu recused himself from practices due to friction with the manager, Nuno's relationship with Marinakis fell apart, and from the reporting it sounded like the manager's firing/quitting was more of an eventuality than a possibility. The 3-0 loss to West Ham, as well as the international break, provided immediate cover for the decision, but no one is fooled here. Nuno was not on the hot seat until the drama began, and even an undefeated start to the season was not likely to save him once this all bubbled over.
And so out goes Nuno and in comes Ange Postecoglou.
The former Tottenham Hotspur manager had both succeeded wildly in North London—after an admirable fifth-place finish in his first year, he fulfilled his own prophecy in his second by bringing Spurs their first major trophy in 17 years, winning last season's Europa League final—and floundered horrifically, ending the league campaign just one spot above the relegation zone. The two sides of that history are what make the union here so hard to assess: Postecoglou is a proven winner, yes, but the faults that made Tottenham so dire domestically last season will clash with the foundation Nuno leaves behind, and I'm not sure what will win out.
Let me explain. Postecoglou's Spurs played some of the most attractive attacking soccer in England over his two-year tenure, a chaotic whirlwind meant to overwhelm opponents. Part of that strategy involved a suicidal high line in defense, the thinking being that the offensive blitz would help Tottenham outscore opponents even if the aggressive front-foot defending and offside trapping didn't keep many clean sheets. That formula worked well in the league in his first year and in Europe last season, but the monumental risks it posed were made clear in league play in his second go-round there.
Injuries to key players and the difficulty of playing such a perilous style eventually took its toll. Tottenham's 65 goals against over 38 EPL games were second-worst among non-relegated teams, and despite scoring the sixth-most goals in the league, Tottenham finished the season with a minus-1 goal difference. Even that feels like a miracle, given that Spurs finished the season with six losses in its final seven games, giving up five goals to Liverpool, and four to both Wolves and Brighton. By the end of the season, even with the long-awaited trophy in hand, it was hard to argue that Postecoglou's overall performance had earned him another chance to turn things around, and so he was sacked.
In terms of today, Postecoglou has a hilarious stylistic clash to resolve upon taking the Forest job. If Tottenham was the league's most ambitious and reckless side last season, then Nuno's Forest was its perfect inverse. The Trees played a low defensive line and preferred to control games by suffocation in its own third. The results were also as different from Tottenham's as could be: 46 goals conceded was good enough for fifth in the league. More than goals shipped, though, the stat that catches my eye most in comparing the two sides comes from the "tackles in the defensive third" category: Tottenham notched 285 of them, while Forest had a whopping 406.
Defensive third tackles isn't typically the first place you look to find a flattering stat, which makes sense: If you're doing so much deep defending, then you probably don't have a lot of control of the ball and are often trapped in your own penalty box under siege. But this was Forest's plan, born from Nuno's understanding of his squads' talents—Forest had great attackers last year who were killers in open space, but the defense wasn't all that formidable individually and therefore needed additional help. It might not have been the sexiest way to play, but it clearly worked.
Postecoglou will have two choices going forward. He can either adapt himself to the team's established, deep-defending style, or he can try to implement Angeball right away and hope for the best. In attack, while he may not have the name-brand firepower he did at Tottenham, Postecoglou does have some shiny toys to play with. Chris Wood is still scoring goals for fun—two already this season—and the trio of Callum Hudson-Odoi, Morgan Gibbs-White, and Dan Ndoye can all blast them in. You don't have to squint too hard to see Postecoglou turning this group into an attacking machine.
But the defense is another story. It's a hard enough adjustment for a team to completely swap styles from one year to the next, but doing it midseason, with no incoming transfers that better fit Postecoglou's tactics, feels like a maniacal decision. Of course, Postecoglou is not scared of maniacal decisions, so I wouldn't rule out him trying to turn the back four of Neco Williams, Ola Aina, Nikola Milenkovic, and Murillo into a high-line high-press defense. Will it work? Almost certainly not! But even when faced with injuries piling up left and right alongside losses last season, Postecoglou didn't ease up on the throttle at Tottenham, and that both won him a trophy and cost him his job.
There's also the question of whether the Greek-born Australian will get along with Marinakis and Edu, but that matter is even more difficult to speculate on. Given how well last season went for Nuno and Forest, I would not have predicted that the pairing would have such an explosive blow-up so soon, and so I could see Postecoglou similarly clashing with management about as clearly as I could see him getting along with his countryman owner. Since Nuno's problems with Edu arose in the transfer market, I could also see that relationship with Postecoglou subbed in staying cordial, at least until the January window.
There are just too many factors there, few of which have to do with results and tactics and all of the things a manager has to deal with on a daily basis, for predictions, but I will be paying attention, and so should you. Forest might not be good, and certainly not as good as last year, but the Premier League's must-see train wreck has already careened off the tracks, and there's no telling how much mayhem is still in store.