There was a delicious irony to Sean Dyche being sacked after Nottingham Forest had 35 shots and failed to score. It was the most a Dyche team has ever managed in a Premier League match. Are you not entertained?
Well no, not really Sean. Lots of them were from outside the box and there were still long periods during which a half-decent team did not really know what to do differently. You were here because the results were king and the results turned.
This was not an evening for hard luck stories even if they carried some weight. This unhappy marriage of convenience had begun to turn sour and three winnable league matches – Crystal Palace, Leeds, Wolves – were sold as saving the season before a tricky run. Forest took two points from the three and may well now be relegated.
The age-old Dychian equilibrium: before then the results have been OK and the performances have not. Nottingham Forest sat 14th in a Premier League table since his appointment before Wednesday. It is just that the shambolic defeats to Leeds United, Brighton and Everton (twice) tend to stick longer in the mind. He will claim that he is being misjudged.
His critics will point out that he always said he would change style with better players. There were reports of players being unhappy with training methods and Dyche calling out the backups after they performed unacceptably at Wrexham in the FA Cup. This never really felt like it would work beyond emergency avoidance and that is no way to live when you just finished seventh in the Premier League. It is as baffling as everything else is within this club.
The atmosphere has changed at the City Ground over the course of 2025-26, but can you blame the supporters? It is not entitlement and it is not even deliberate. They have no idea what to think, simply split into factions as their club lurches between managerial styles and recruitment scatterguns.
On Wednesday, they jeered when expensive summer signings failed to do the basics and booed loudly at full-time. The television cameras immediately panned to Forest’s manager, who attempted half an applause before thinking much better of it and heading down the tunnel. Keep on walking, Sean.
That tenseness, the psychodrama of supporting Forest, is unhelpful and exhausting. It is also undeniable. Every game here is presented as a day of judgement, the emperor waiting to raise his thumb up or down while the braying masses have their own say to try and shift the agenda. With a third of the season still to go, they are onto their fourth manager of the season, another guy forced to run from the lions.
And that is on the club. Ambition can lift you up but it can also tie you down with a weight around your legs. Tell your people that you intend them to live out their dreams and do not act surprised when hard, unpleasant reality goes down badly. Dyche is many things but a purveyor of escapism has never been one of them. It runs beyond who is picking and guiding the team when an entire club perennially feels three games away from existential crisis.
The irony does not so much ring here as explode. In July, the intention of the club was for Nuno Espirito Santo to overhaul the aesthetics of this team on the pitch, marrying success and front-foot football rather than one or the other. There is a sporting chance that Nuno could relegate Forest playing his way while Dyche, and his own distinct style, played a large hand in taking Forest down.
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You can present this season as a series of unfortunate events, mistakes that get piled on top of mistakes as you chase your tail trying to fix the first one. You appoint a sporting director who falls out with your fine manager. You appoint a tactical dogmatist and he never wins a game. So you appoint the firefighter and it ends with him playing with matches. Vitor Pereira may well be next.
Maybe this all gets sorted out. Maybe West Ham’s revival peters away. Maybe the new manager somehow navigates Liverpool, Manchester City and Fenerbahce (twice) in his first four games and maintains a gap to the dreaded dotted line. Maybe, maybe.
But right now, Nottingham Forest appear as a how-to guide for getting unexpectedly relegated: backing the wrong people as decision-makers, eroding an environment that worked, wasting your revenue in the transfer market, haphazardly darting between managerial personalities and then left with little option but to try the whole thing again. This is what they do around here. The appropriate punishment may come in May and they will deserve it.
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