West Ham on the Brink: Nuno Sack Could Spark Historic Premier League Disaster
The relationship between Nuno Espirito Santo and West Ham seemed ideal, but it is already beginning to fall apart. The sacking of the Portuguese would be a historic event.
The Premier League’s marketing slogan is “anyone can beat anyone,” albeit with the recent amendment, Wolves are no longer included in the former, while the latter is now oddly likely to refer to Liverpool.
Few managers possess the same lack of main character vigour as Nuno Espirito Santo, yet he has somehow managed to capture the inherent silliness of this season and that cliché.
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His Nottingham Forest thrashing of Brentford 3-1 on the first weekend was the catalyst. Two weeks later, Nuno’s team was thrashed 3-0 by West Ham, making the Portuguese the first manager to step down this season.
Nuno has now been in charge of a dreadfully dull home defeat to the same Brentford, who are the only team to lose to either the 51-year-old or Forest this season, in his role as the replacement for fired Hammers manager Graham Potter, who abruptly takes charge of the most expensive player in Premier League history.
During a sombre post-match discussion, Nuno stated again, “We have a problem.” The team’s lineup, which included a right-back at left-back and a left-back at right-back without a recognised striker, as well as substitutions like a triple defender change at halftime and a fifth and final roll of the dice to substitute a defensive midfielder for the final 20 minutes.
When chasing a goal at home against a team with similar goals, absolved him of all responsibility.
There are moments when you can understand Mr. Marinakis’s desire for a little more ambition and adventure.
Rather, Nuno blamed it on the kind of identity struggle with which he has come to be associated.
The Spurs’ once-inedible stuffing un a Mourinho-Conte sandwich has sparked a cultural conflict at Nottingham Forest and sparked a civil war in East London.
You may eventually have to accept that you and your decisions may contribute to the problem. I believe that everyone is worried. Our own fans are able to sense it. You can tell they’re worried.
He spoke of a “understandable” gap with the fans, saying, “Then this concern becomes silence and silence becomes anxiety.”
That triumph against Brentford at the City Ground in August, when “the energy from the fans” propelled Forest through as they “controlled” their visitors, was a far cry from that.
The Bees were further motivated by the eerie silence at a London Stadium that was boycotted. Due to the outcome, West Ham was forced into an uncomfortable relegation zone that favoured Nuno.
Even if his fingerprints have long since been erased at Wolves and he is not the primary suspect in the crime scenes that have endangered the Hammers and Forest, those are challenging personal ties to separate and disregard.
In a single season, no manager has ever been linked to two Premier League relegations. In a Premier League season, no manager has ever been fired twice.
Nuno is on the edge of history after finishing the last leg of West Ham’s first-ever league start with four straight home losses, even if he is comparatively far down the list of people responsible for the mess, now sitting in 18th and 19th place in the standings.
In a single season, it is not completely unusual for a coach to defeat two clubs. In 1987–88, Dave Bassett was in a lot of difficulties.
He was fired by the Hornets in January, and he ended up losing his job as manager of Sheffield United to Watford, who were in the Second Division.
“It was really unwise,” Bassett once said to a reporter who followed Watford’s ascent and then decline throughout that decade.
For me to accept it after he made the offer right immediately. It was an enormous mistake.
Bassett replaced Potter with Graham Taylor and took the Watford post in June rather than October, so the circumstances were slightly different, but he has long harboured the idea that he “was a square peg in a round hole at the wrong time.”
At the moment, Nuno and David Sullivan may be hampered by the same buyer’s regret.
What appeared to be the ideal pairing of an unattached coach-hunting mid-table club with an available mid-table safety net manager, both of whom have aroused the elite’s ire with differing degrees of European success, has swiftly fallen apart to expose a host of issues that go far beyond a simple switch in the custodian.
In retrospect, it might not have been pleasant for Nuno to take responsibility for those problems, particularly so soon after negotiating Forest’s procedural maze, and for West Ham to continue patching up the mess that is their player acquisition strategy.
In a season when the promoted teams seem to have at least dimly perused the survival blueprint, with little indication of the bed-defecation levels that temporarily dragged a couple of giants into the orbit, the team that once defined being Too Good To Go Down may not be good enough to stay up.
Even if West Ham’s lone victory in their first nine games hadn’t come against the manager currently in charge of saving them, their prospects would still be incredibly dire.
