The Athletic - Hughton's Demise Article

[Peter Baxendale Thomas]

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Inside Hughton’s demise at Forest: No Plan B, leaked WhatsApp messages, late transfers
Paul Taylor and Daniel Taylor

A brief handshake with Neil Warnock and a swift, purposeful stride down the City Ground tunnel, Chris Hughton was pursued by the echoes of the now all-too-familiar chants of “You’re getting sacked in the morning” from a section of frustrated Nottingham Forest fans.
The truth of it was that Hughton’s fate had largely been decided long before this moment, with the club already having identified a shortlist of potential replacements in the days before kick-off.
Defeat to Middlesbrough was not exactly a final nail in the coffin, but it was a fitting footnote to a frustrating, disappointing tenure.
After the final whistle, his opposite number, Warnock, had offered words of sympathy for Hughton, before then regaling the media with the tale of how he had almost taken the Forest job, during Fawaz Al Hasawi’s tenure, before being scared off by fears of potential interference in team selection, at a time when a press conference to announce his appointment had already been tentatively scheduled.
On Wednesday night, Warnock had been a whirling dervish on the touchline, harassing and hassling the officials and more than once seeming to be on the verge of spontaneous combustion. Hughton, in contrast, only rarely moved from the same spot, two or three feet from the right-hand edge of his technical area, where he stood with his arms crossed over his chest, quietly watching the final moments of his Forest career unfold.
Now the current owners will hope to make their usual swift appointment, having decided that change is required, following a seventh Championship game without a win.
When 62-year-old Hughton emerged for his interviews, he was yet to discover he had been relieved of his duties, confirming that such talk was “news to him”. But he faced difficult questions about his future with the same dignity and composure as always.
Would he be disappointed if this was the end for him at the City Ground?
“It has been a very testing job and a very challenging summer,” Hughton told The Athletic. “It has been a very challenging start and we have not had the results we needed or the performances needed to get them.
“I constantly think about how we can improve. Can we play a different system? Can we do things different? But we have to look at the squad we have and the type of players we have. We have to put a team together around that.
“We had ups and downs last season, but we did not have a period like this one. So yes, it has been a more challenging job than I might have thought. But that does not make any difference. It will be this squad of players that will have to turn this season around.”

Where the next manager is concerned, Forest are understood to want to appoint a modern thinker, a head coach, rather than an old school manager and somebody with a track record of working with young players. Former Swansea manager, Steve Cooper, is on Forest’s radar but if he is appointed the 41-year-old will have to hit the ground running if the poor start is not to turn into another fight against relegation.
A change in fortunes will also be required to improve the mood at the City Ground, where Forest fans demonstrated a dark sense of humour after going behind, with chants of “how shit must you be, it’s only 1-0”, “You’re nothing special, we lose every week” and ironic cries of “Ole, ole, ole” every time their side passed the ball.
Fans have been served up the club’s worst start to a season in 108 years — and that was only ever likely to have one outcome.

 

[Peter Baxendale Thomas]

As Hughton looked round the dressing room for one of his final team talks, maybe he didn’t realise that some of those players had started to give up on him.
Forest had just lost 1-0 to Stoke City without registering a single shot on target. Their fans had turned on Hughton. With the dressing-room door locked, Hughton began the inquest into another defeat.
“Clueless,” was the verdict of one first-team player, in a series of leaked WhatsApp messages seen by The Athletic. Hughton’s attempts to lift morale had not worked. “Comes in after the game and says we were brilliant until the goal,” read one message. “We had no fucking shots.”
The player’s verdict was that it was, in the bluntest terms, “a shower of shit”. So bad, in fact, that he wanted to leave. The tactics were “the defenders and midfield bypass everyone and just boot the ball back to their keeper or the 6ft 6ins centre-half.”
“I lost it,” another WhatsApp message, leaked on to various public forums, states. “Just sat there and hammered Yatesy (Ryan Yates). Never passed the ball forward. All the coaches are sat there and I just lost my rag.”
It is certainly fair to say that some, though not all, of the players had found it difficult to embrace Hughton’s tactics.
Yet perhaps the most disconcerting part is that many supporters will agree with the player’s verdict, via Whatsapp, that Forest’s attackers had “no fucking help from the centre-midfielders and no stepping up from the defenders”.
Hughton replaced Sabri Lamouchi after four games last season and, by the end of that campaign, Forest were the third lowest scorers in the entire Football League, ahead of only Derby County and a Southend United side that was relegated into the National League.
Of all the statistics that sum up Hughton’s inability to make a more favourable impact, perhaps this is the one that sums up why his time in Nottingham will not be remembered fondly.
Yet it is a thick file of evidence to suggest that Hughton’s style was simply not working.
Even ignoring, for one moment, the club’s current position at the bottom of the Championship, Forest had the worst shooting accuracy in the entire league last season. Only 35.3 per cent hit the target — or, to put it another way, they missed the target with almost two-thirds of their shots.
Their shot conversion rate (6.97 per cent) was the least impressive of all the Championship clubs. There were only two teams who had fewer shots on target (not even averaging four per game), and only three sides with fewer touches in the opposition penalty area. Forest never rose above 14th in the Championship throughout Hughton’s entire tenure. Go through the team and it is difficult to think of any player who has significantly improved. Several have regressed. And the statistics have not been any more encouraging so far this season.
Nicholas Randall, Forest’s chairman, did his best before their first home game of the current campaign, a 2-1 defeat to Bournemouth, to convince an increasingly weary fan base that they had an elite manager in place.
Hughton, he said, had “an unparalleled reputation in football”, making Forest “the envy of a number of Premier League clubs in securing his services”.
But 33 days since that eulogy, Forest’s fans can probably be excused for wondering whether Randall has been guilty too many times of exaggeration to suit the club’s agenda.

Randall had previously spoken about a five-year plan that included a new state-of-the-art training ground, Champions League-level facilities at the City Ground, promotion from the Championship, qualifying for Europe and a personal pledge that Forest would act at all times with what he described as the class and values of old-school Arsenal.
That open letter in 2017 included the line that manager Mark Warburton was “the perfect fit” and that he personally could assure him “the precious commodity of time”. Warburton was sacked four months into the season. And that set the tone for everything that has followed.
The reality is that Dane Murphy’s appointment as CEO meant Hughton had a new boss to impress and, even before a ball was kicked in anger, there were rumblings that they might not be ideally suited to one another. Hughton had lost his job at Brighton because the south-coast club did not think he could adapt his playing style and wanted a more attractive approach.
So, too, did the Forest fans who have not seen their team win a league game since April 5. And the decision to remove Hughton is not a knee-jerk one. Forest have been looking at potential replacements for several weeks.
While he never got going at Nottingham Forest, it is hard not to feel a degree of sympathy for Hughton, on a human level.
When he was appointed, journalists who had worked with him previously spoke about a decent character, a gentleman — and he has been exactly that throughout his Forest tenure.
There has been plenty to criticise; plenty to cast a spotlight on. But through the struggles, Hughton’s persona has not changed. He remained a calm, composed figure, even when faced with those chants of “you’re getting sacked in the morning” from his own club’s fans.
“It is very tough to listen to that, particularly when you have your family and grandkids at the game. It is not nice for them to hear,” said Hughton recently. “But it is part of the game and if you do not have thick skin; if you do not have broad shoulders, it can make things more difficult.”
The best spell of Hughton’s tenure came in January and February, when Forest suffered only two defeats in 15 Championship matches while collecting 27 points. But through those encouraging moments, there were no fans there to witness it.
Instead, since they returned to the City Ground, Forest supporters have witnessed four defeats in four Championship matches.
Did the situation create a disconnect? Did Hughton find it hard to establish a relationship with fans, who rarely, if ever, chanted his name?
“Yes, it has,” Hughton told The Athletic, prior to kick-off against Middlesbrough. “We had some good periods last season and, in that time — and this is not about myself as much as the team — the supporters were not there to see it.
“There is something to be said for that. But I also understand that it has been a very, very poor start to this season. We have an emotional, passionate crowd. What you cannot ask for is for things to be only one-way; you can’t only expect the good. What the fans do is turn up in their thousands to give us their support.”
While there was that dissenting voice on social media, Hughton has also had support in the dressing room. Prior to Hughton’s final game, Joe Worrall painted a picture of a steady, calming influence.
“When things are going well, he does not get too high, when they are not, he does not get too low. Yes, the fans are frustrated (with the start to the season). I am frustrated. Everyone is,” said Worrall. “But it is very rare that he gets excited and it is very rare that you see him down. That comes with his experience because he knows exactly what it takes to get out of this division.
“We had a couple of games last season when we spent an hour in the dressing room afterwards. At Norwich last season we sat for a long time talking. He gave us a bit of a rollocking and spoke about how things were not acceptable. So yes, there is that side to him.”

 

[Peter Baxendale Thomas]

On a basic level, Hughton’s biggest downfall, his biggest failure was not any breakdown of his relations with the players or the Forest hierarchy. It was a refusal to try anything different, he had no Plan B. Those results never came; the mood never changed. At least not for the better.
He has faced similar criticisms before, at Norwich and Brighton.
“I did not like the way he was as a manager,” former Forest striker Grant Holt, who played under Hughton at Norwich, told the Undr The Cosh podcast. Holt added that he did not like the defensive philosophy of Hughton’s football, despite liking the man himself.
“I did not enjoy it,” he added. “We did have an argument about it once and he said to me ‘if you do not like the way I am going to play, you are not going to play’.
“I told him it was fine, because I’m bored to death playing the way you play anyway…”
But another impact of the COVID lockdown was a sluggish, cautious transfer window throughout the Championship, among those clubs not armed with parachute payments at least.
For Hughton, the reinforcements arrived too late. Ten new signings eventually came, which prompted talk of adopting a 4-3-3 formation, with Paraguay international Braian Ojeda set to be a key figure in midfield. But with the 21-year-old forced to isolate after international duty, Hughton’s last two games saw him persevere with the same 4-2-3-1 approach and the same structured mentality that had become a source of frustration for so many.
There was a glimmer of a suggestion that things might change against Cardiff on September 11, as a well-crafted team goal, finished by Lewis Grabban, provided a sense of hope. But then normal service resumed as, for the fourth time in six Championship games, Forest conceded two soft goals to succumb to a 2-1 defeat.
Against Middlesbrough, the story remained familiar. Forest missed the few decent chances they created, while Warnock’s side did not. The agonising mistake from keeper Ethan Horvath, who controlled Loic Mbe Soh’s back pass poorly and allowed Onel Hernandez to fire into an empty net for their second goal, felt like an unnecessarily cruel coup de grace.
The fact he subsequently used his final substitution to replace Mbe Soh with another right-back, in Jayden Richardson, at a time when Forest needed two goals to get back in the game, only underlined Hughton’s habit of making cautious, like-for-like changes off the bench.
There are mitigating factors when assessing what has unfolded.
Forest have had a fierce and admirable desire to do things differently this summer; to build a younger squad that is full of ambition, hunger and potential — all while cutting the wage bill and trimming some fat.
All of which took time and, in the process, left Forest — and Hughton — short of options in key areas. Forest lacked options in both full-back positions. Gaetan Bong was brought back in from the cold to play at left-back — after previously being told he could leave the club — and, at times, still looked partially frozen.

On the right side, Forest have had to rely on an 18-year-old at times; Fin Back is a young man with a very bright future ahead of him — and who performed well when called upon, letting nobody down — but his initial inclusion was still motivated by circumstance.
Hughton departs without three of the new signings — Ojeda, Rodrigo Ely and Mohamed Drager having kicked a ball.
While their failure to sign a striker — with a deal for Bordeaux forward Josh Maja collapsing at the 11th hour when the French club thought it was done — has left Hughton to persevere with Lyle Taylor up front, who has struggled badly in the last two games.
In the days before his departure, it felt telling that Hughton began to speak about his tenure as if it had already ended.
“You feel the pressure of the job, of the support base and what the club want. But the last person the players need to see down in the dumps or not on decent form is the manager,” said Hughton in his final pre-match press conference. “I enjoy this job. It is less enjoyable at times like this. But the plusses are the work you do on the training pitch; working with young players is the best thing you do.
“It is only when you are here that you realise what a big and great club this is. I have thoroughly enjoyed managing this club.”

 

[AdebolaCornflakes]

I read this earlier and thought it was a little disappointing. Hardly an 'inside story' - they've just repeated stuff which has been in the public domain for weeks.

 

[Basha73]

Cheers for this - a good read if a little bland in terms of not trying to dig a little deeper.

Hughton has failed here, of that there is no doubt. There is however an air about the club and the people inside and around it that confirms my opinion that Hughton was royally fucked over during his time.

There’s a tweet doing the rounds saying that Wilder or Cooper are favourites to be sacked by Forest by January. That says it all to me.

 

[payola1980]

Cheers for this - a good read if a little bland in terms of not trying to dig a little deeper.

Hughton has failed here, of that there is no doubt. There is however an air about the club and the people inside and around it that confirms my opinion that Hughton was royally fucked over during his time.

There’s a tweet doing the rounds saying that Wilder or Cooper are favourites to be sacked by Forest by January. That says it all to me.

If are wilder or Cooper are winning football matches then there’s no need to sack them in January . Chris Hughton has been here nearly a year and it’s been dreadful so he’s been given time to put it right,

 

[ZedRed]

Cheers for this - a good read if a little bland in terms of not trying to dig a little deeper.

Hughton has failed here, of that there is no doubt. There is however an air about the club and the people inside and around it that confirms my opinion that Hughton was royally fucked over during his time.

There’s a tweet doing the rounds saying that Wilder or Cooper are favourites to be sacked by Forest by January. That says it all to me.

Can we not just sack them in advance?

 

[Basha73]

Can we not just sack them in advance?

Just hand them a whack of money and not hire them in the first place.

 

[ZedRed]

Just hand them a whack of money and not hire them in the first place.

Exactly. I'm volunteering myself if they want to try me for doing this.

They've pretty much tried everyone else anyway.

I was thinking of setting up a kind of track and trace app that would tell you when you're within a mile of a former Forest manager, but I think it would probably get annoying as you'd be getting notifications all the time.

 

[mao tse tung]

I read this earlier and thought it was a little disappointing. Hardly an 'inside story' - they've just repeated stuff which has been in the public domain for weeks.

I read it earlier; I could think of harsher words than disappointing to describe it; it was just a cut and paste exercise from previous articles and another chance for Danny to have a whinge because no one at the club will talk to him.