Steve Cooper got Nottingham Forest into the top tier and should NOT be sacked – Page

‘Twenty-one players… they’re all f****** s***’ was the chant of Bournemouth’s away fans as they came from behind to beat Nottingham Forest 3-2 last month.

So much money wasted on the City Ground, that number is already outdated.

A total of 22 new players have walked through the doors since my club’s return to the Premier League after an absence of more than a quarter of a century.

Twenty-two players in three months.

Supporters were stunned at the level of spending… Forest spent more in those 12 weeks than they had earned in their previous 157-year history.

The transfer fee record was broken every week as an array of talent arrived.

Some got carried away by it, which I think was understandable given how strange this was to the majority of Forest fans. Talk about a challenge for Europe, even the top four is achievable… but amid the exaggeration and hysteria, the voices of reason, those who spoke common sense and advocated caution, a reality check of football, were drowned out.

So it’s depressingly inevitable, but immensely frustrating, that Forest is now being crushed by a ridiculous expectation from some of the fanbase and, by all accounts, the current owners.

Make no mistake, Evangelos Marinakis has not only dug into his big pockets to invest in a Premier League roster, he has done the equivalent of Ebeneezer Scrooge on Christmas morning after his overnight revelation – £140 million and that’s counting.

But if you’re spending more than part of Europe’s elite and you’re the new kid on the block (albeit with a rich and glorious history from a bygone era), you better hope the results will come your way.

Because as Steve Cooper finds out, delivering Forest to the promised land arguably two or three years ahead of schedule, reuniting the club with its fan base and leaving an indelible mark as the only Reds manager to come close to Clough’s genius, probably counts for nothing when you lose five on the spin in the toughest competition in the world.

Forget Forest is catching up… and I don’t mean a few places off the grid after a slow start. I’m talking almost 25 years behind established Premier League clubs. Forest broke through the ceiling when they were promoted, disrupting the established status quo of the yo-yo clubs bouncing up and down thanks to the shamefully unfair parachute payments.

And they did it thanks to Steve Cooper.

But forget that, you’ve spent £140m on 22 new players.

The argument goes that we should beat Leicester who won the Premier League when Forest finished 16th in the Championship, we should win matches against Fulham and Bournemouth, both with very recent PL pedigrees and recipients of the parachute payments referred to above .

And so the story gets distorted because the perspectives get distorted. If you want an illustration of how ridiculous some football fans can be, take to Twitter and see some Reds supporters screaming for Cooper to go… shortly after a year we were anchored at the foot of the Championship and playing it worst football ever seen at the City Ground since the David Platt and Joe Kinnear eras.

But this is the game now. There are some Forest fans (and I can empathize with this) who, while enjoying the giddiness of promotion and the dreamlike state we all found ourselves in after returning to the Premier League… already longing for a normal kick-off on Saturday at three hours and the comforting familiarity of games against QPR, Blackburn et al.

I believe the vast majority of Forest fans want Cooper to stay in charge, I’d keep him no matter what this season… 11 total!

You see, most Forest supporters get it. We know we surpassed last season and we did that thanks to Cooper. Period of time.

And it’s not just because of what he did on the field. I just cannot articulate the extraordinary impact he has had on my club. Forget promotion for a minute – even without it, things started to stir in the fall of last season, a spark that then ignited early in the new year and quickly engulfed the fanbase.

It was not only a hope beyond expectation, it was a feeling that a club that had long lost all semblance of identity, of connection to its supporters, a club so lost, so stranded and shackled by its illustrious history and seemingly in the hands of mediocre administrators who dismantled it stone by stone, season after season, were doomed for eternity.

Rest assured that Steve Cooper single-handedly grabbed Forest by the scruff of the neck and instilled a conviction in the players and supporters – a belief we had almost given up as a value attributed only to other football clubs – that we could do it again to be. Not great, not world famous, just a really good football club that could play decent football.

That’s what most of us want if we’re being honest.

For one glorious, sun-filled 90 minutes at Wembley in May, which I guarantee, will forever remain in the top five life moments of any Forest fan… Steve Cooper has delivered a miracle.

Forest owners will want a return on their investment, unrealistic as that is, and chances are Cooper will be replaced. If so, the echoes of Bielsa’s looting in Leeds will permeate the City Ground for some time to come.

There are already rumors about Benitez (shoot me now), Sean Dyche. Yes, of course!

After all, football is a game of numbers. Score more than your opponent, it’s that simple.

Speaking of numbers… those 22 players we signed in three months happen to be the same number of managers Forest had in the 10 years before they hired Steve Cooper.

Football, huh? Damned hell.