We don’t do it often, but sometimes it’s nice to be nice. And Nuno Espirito Santo’s comeback arc is nice, isn’t it?
Whatever happens from here with Nottingham Forest – and let’s be entirely honest here it is still quite unlikely to be ‘third place with Chris Wood the second most deadly striker in the league’ – the damage done to his reputation in English football in a few silly months at the country’s silliest football club has been significantly repaired.
And that’s a good and just thing. Nuno was a brilliant manager for a really quite extended period of time at Wolves, whose fans still adore the time they spent together, but the nature of football in this country and human nature in general meant a very real danger that his name here would far more readily bring to mind those miserable weeks at Tottenham.
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A combination of big-club and recency bias and the simple fact that catastrophe so often lives longer in the mind than triumph could have done for him. When he rocked up next in Saudi Arabia the fear was that here was a good manager ruined. Sure, he wasn’t going to go broke, but here was a manager not yet 50 of proven talents apparently heading for the irrelevance of a walk-on part in the unwatched and unloved Cristiano Ronaldo Retirement Tour.
It never felt right, it never felt fair. He clearly wasn’t the right choice for Spurs. It was never going to work even if he’d been their first choice rather than roughly seventh after everyone else had said “LOL no” and Spurs fans themselves had kiboshed the idea of Gennaro ‘Sometimes Maybe Sh*t’ Gattuso.
It wasn’t Nuno’s fault that Spurs made such a complete bollocks of that manager search. And nobody could really blame him for taking a job that could very much have looked to him at that time as a logical next step up the ladder. He would, like so many others before him, soon discover that logic and Tottenham rarely make for easy bedfellows.
He walked into a mess at Spurs, with the protracted Kane-to-City story dominating all other talk. That move never happened, of course, but it clearly affected preparations. Nuno then carelessly won his first three games – including a Kane-less success over City on the opening day – to stumble blindly into the Manager of the Month curse.
That was his one real error at Spurs. Clearly there was no way back from there. As well as a stumbling start to the Europa Conference, Nuno’s Spurs lost five of the next seven league games culminating in a 3-0 El Sackico defeat to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Manchester United.
There is no need for hagiography here. Nuno was the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time. Those three 1-0 wins that began the season were precisely as illusory as you could imagine three 1-0 wins might be. There was no scandal or unfairness in Spurs realising that error and seeking to make swift amends, but that doesn’t mean the speed with which Antonio Conte was appointed as his replacement the day after his sacking didn’t leave a sour taste.
Nuno was set up to fail at Spurs and duly did. Life being what it is, the almost 200 games’ worth of stellar service to Wolves was in real danger of being lost to the general football fan in the noise of four stupid months at Spurs.
Making that next move to Saudi Arabia quietened the noise but was never going to restore a damaged reputation. For what it’s worth – which is two-fifths of f*** all – Nuno did pretty well with Al-Ittihad. Even won a league title, despite that interesting almost nobody and impressing even fewer.
Nottingham Forest are also a very silly football club, with an owner who is quite possibly a psychopath. Jumping back into the Premier League with yet another very silly club to replace the beloved Steve Cooper and fight a relegation battle was a bold choice from Nuno. Had it gone wrong, it would have surely been his last dance in English football.
It was also a slightly left-field pick for Forest. But hasn’t it turned out marvellously.
We’re loathe to give Forest too much credit. It’s terribly unfair, but just like their many successful player transfers in the last 18 months there’s just too much sense of fluke among the chaos at that club. Of flinging shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, and surprising even themselves when a lot happens to stick in really quite pleasing patterns.
But a club whose last two permanent managerial appointments have been Cooper and Nuno surely can’t quite be as insane as it appears from the outside. Let’s just not look too much further back in that manager appointment history, yeah?
They really have nailed it with Nuno, though, and deserve praise for seeing beyond the bad fit at Spurs and seeing the perfect fit at Wolves, a club he got promoted into the Premier League and then established firmly in the top half. Forest, for all their nonsense, were a lot more Wolves than Spurs.
Having weathered a points deduction to keep them up handily enough, Nuno has kicked Forest on in a way absolutely nobody predicted. He has, in what is still a really short space of time, found order in the chaos of that Forest squad. What had looked like a random hotch-potch selection of players bought primarily because they could be bought has, under Nuno’s careful guidance, turned into one of the most coherent and straightforward teams in the Premier League.
It can sound like damning with faint praise to say Forest are a simple, straightforward team. But simple and straightforward outcomes for a team really just mean that everyone knows exactly what they are supposed to be doing and is capable of doing it. There is an incalculable amount of work that goes into making a football team look like what it’s doing is obvious and straightforward.
If it were actually as obvious and straightforward as Forest make their unapologetically Wood-focused strategy appear, then everyone would do it, wouldn’t they? And they don’t, because it isn’t.
And anyway, making anything look straightforward at Forest is pretty much as impressive as doing it at Spurs.
Spurs were not the one, but in Forest Nuno appears to have found the freak for him and you’d need a heart of stone not to be pleased for him.