Here is a sentence you never want written about your soccer team: Twenty minutes after Saturday's 0-3 loss to Chelsea, Nottingham Forest fired the manager it had hired just 39 days ago.
That's right, Ange Postecoglou is out. His sacking was announced via terse statement from the team just minutes after Postecoglou himself had stepped off the grass at the City Ground. Pity the mid-level Forest executive who was tasked with intercepting the curmudgeonly Australian outside the dressing room and informing him that he no longer had a job. That guy probably got called some rude names, at least one of them starting with the letter "c."
Ange's tenure at Forest will go down as one of the most disappointing and ill-advised in top-flight history. Forest racked up a record of six losses and two draws during Postecoglou's eight games in charge, including a 3-2 loss to Danish side Midtjylland in the Europa League. Worse than the results themselves is how easy they were to see coming. Previous manager Nuno Espirito Santo spent all of last season fashioning Forest into a stout defensive unit with a vicious counter attack, which made the team wholly unsuited to practice Postecoglou's preferred style of high-line defending and hyper-aggressive attacking. Giving this particular Forest squad to Postecoglou was like asking an art instructor to teach calculus.
The fact that this all ended exactly where everyone thought it would doesn't make the journey any less depressing. Forest was the darling of the Premier League last season, just a win away from qualifying for the Champions League, and then this season started off with an internal bust-up becoming embarrassingly public and costing Nuno his job. In came Postecoglou to do exactly what he did at Tottenham last season—plunge the team down to 17th in the table—and now Forest might be eyeing up Sean Dyche to lead a relegation rescue mission. Woof.
As for Postecoglou, he'll be hoping everyone forgets about this episode as quickly as possible. The memory of Tottenham's fifth-place finish during his first season in charge there is fading faster than he'd like. He just played a key role in erasing all the progress Forest made last year, and his inability to make his tactics stick over the longterm at Tottenham looks much worse in the context of Thomas Frank taking over and immediately turning the squad into a pragmatic and effective one that looks like it's going to be right in the mix fighting for a Champions League place. It's fun to romanticize a big gruff manager who gives great quotes and clearly has some innovative ideas about how to play soccer, but even the most tortured geniuses have to put points on the board at some point. May he find future success in a place more suited to his abilities.
