Two days that took. Two days for Sean Dyche to no-nonsense his way to something Ange Postecoglou and all the nonsense couldn’t achieve in 39 by winning a game of football. And something that Forest haven’t managed at all in almost six months by keeping a clean sheet.
Three points, two penalties, one clean sheet. You ask yourself how much more Dyche this 2-0 victory over Porto could have been, and the answer is none. None more Dyche.
And this long-awaited, much-needed victory wasn’t even a ‘tougher tests await’ caper. This was not your standard obvious opportunity to get something going that the Europa can offer. This was a stern test against a team who’ve made a near flawless start to their own season both domestically and in this competition.
They hadn’t so much as fallen behind in a game until they came up against Dyche. This was a hugely encouraging win that needs no caveating on the basis of the opposition, who fielded a tremendously Barclays Jakob Kiwior-Jan Bednarek centre-back pairing.
Bednarek was involved in two key moments. It was his careless handball that gave Forest the first of the two penalties that settled the contest, and his possible equaliser chalked off by VAR for an earlier offside.
They were instructive moments not just in this game but for what we can now expect going forward from Forest under Dyche.
It’s very tempting to just look at the score, see a first clean sheet for Forest since April Fool’s Day against confirmed fools Manchester United, and goals that both come from the penalty spot and chortlingly conclude that Dyche has already cracked it.
But while that Bednarek equaliser was rightly disallowed, it did highlight the inevitable: that two days have not in fact been long enough for Dyche to just meat-and-gravy all Forest’s set-piece problems away. It is going to take time for him to strip away all the doubt and all the utter woke nonsense, but this fine win against decent opposition offers plenty to suggest he’ll do it.
It’s already easy to identify some potential big winners from Dyche’s arrival. The big centre-backs, so effective under Nuno Espirito Santo last season and so exposed in Postecoglou’s brief and catastrophic reign, were firmly back in their comfort zone here, while Douglas Luiz and Elliot Anderson is a midfield pairing with a great deal to recommend it.
They complemented each other here in a way that just hasn’t yet happened despite there really being no obvious reason why they shouldn’t in fact be ideal engine-room comrades.
The second goal from the second penalty certainly settled the understandable nerves around the City Ground late on in a game in which a very good Porto side remained dangerously live contenders up to that point.
Although we do imagine Dyche might have some opinions about changing penalty takers when there has been no personnel change to require it. It is certainly utter nonsense of some unacceptable kind, but we’ll wait for the next episode of the podcast for confirmation.
If the win was the biggest thing tonight and the clean sheet a hugely welcome second tick on the list of ideal outcomes, a first goal of the season for Morgan Gibbs-White would also have been somewhere not too far further down, and there was visible relief after he scored emphatically enough from the spot.
Forest’s players might all be suffering from whiplash given the speed and nature of their changing circumstances over the last few months, but none more so than Gibbs-White, for whom the stuttering start to the season has felt not so much perfectly understandable as entirely inevitable.
Igor Jesus took the second spot-kick to take his Europa League tally to three and Forest tally to five. He not only gets his first goal at the City Ground since his summer move, but also his first Forest goal that isn’t ruined by opposition comebacks.
In truth, there was little chance that Dyche would do anything to surprise anybody tonight, but what he did do was offer pretty compelling evidence that what worked for Nuno will still work for him. There was never any real reason for that not to be the case.
The best thing to be said about this performance really was how much it looked like one from last season. There was nothing complicated about it, but there was a lot that was very effective. The defence was organised and disciplined, screened by midfielders who looked to move the ball forward at pace when the opportunity arose and wingers who made life difficult for the opposition.
It will forever be a mystery why Mr Marinakis ever wanted something so very different when this precise and organised approach suits this squad so very well.
