Before Steve Cooper bucked the trend, Nottingham Forest went through a number of managers with a varying degree of success.
When he first arrived at the City Ground, Evangelos Marinakis was striving to put the right people in place to bring the glory days back to Forest.
In 2019, he turned to Martin O’Neill – a man who knows what it takes to be successful at Forest after winning two European Cups with the club as a player.
The spell proved unsuccessful and after just six months in charge, O’Neill was soon out of work again, failing to lead the club into the play-offs despite being in a decent position.
What Martin O’Neill really thinks about Evangelos Marinakis
This isn’t the first time that O’Neill has taken aim at the Forest owner – and something tells us that it might not be the last.
O’Neill delivered a rant towards Marinakis back in November and there is no love lost between the two parties it would seem.
The man who served Forest with distinction as a player recently sat down with The Overlap and the talk turned towards his shortlived spell with the Reds as the manager.
He said: “What happened was I’d had an opportunity to manage the club three or four times and I didn’t do it.
“After Mark Warburton left in January of the previous year, they asked me, so I go to the interview and I’m sitting down with the club – I didn’t really like them – and the following year I’m in another interview in the same room with the same group of people I don’t like and I take the job. I’m off my rocker.
“I take the job and Marinakis said to me don’t worry about this season, we’ll deal with it, we’ll get ready for next season. We had 19 games and we actually won the last three and then a week of pre-season and they come in and said the way you want to run the football club is not the way we want to run it. Fine, okay, right, that’s the way you want to go and that was it.
“The funny thing about it was that the next manager came in and within two weeks he’d signed 15 players and we did need some new players.”
Marinakis has last laugh after ditching O’Neill
Ultimately, the football club belongs to Marinakis and with that in mind, he can do with it whatever he sees fit.
O’Neill’s win ratio of 41% from his 19 matches is heavily swayed with three wins at the end of the season when there was absolutely nothing riding on them.
The wins against Middlesbrough, QPR and Bolton were essentially dead rubbers and that element has to be taken into consideration.
Marinakis decided to offload O’Neill before things got really sticky and were it not for Covid-19, his replacement, Sabri Lamouchi would likely have reached the play-offs with Forest.
It was a big call to make and Marinakis did what he felt was right in the best interests of the football club that he has run exceptionally well over the years.
It’s a shame that O’Neill speaks as though he has a real axe to grind whenever Forest becomes the topic of conversation and hopefully, in the future the legendary player can grow to love the football club once again.
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