Dyche cannot believe his luck – curing Forest’s utter woke nonsense is his perfect job

Sean Dyche surely cannot believe his luck.

It’s hard to conceive of a more perfect canvas than a humbled yet thoroughly capable Forest squad for Dyche to paint an anti-woke masterpiece.

There are two ideal scenarios for Dyche to come in to a club and unleash his Brexitball. Either a club that is thoroughly aware of its limitations, or one paying the ultimate price for being entirely unaware of them.

Nottingham Forest and their main-character owner deluded themselves into the deeply dangerous belief that one thoroughly competent season playing rigidly defined and expertly trained counter-attacking football in a year when so many big teams were just awful had elevated them directly into the elite.

That they were now a club that could dare to dream big and face no real consequences should the heat of the Barclays sun prove too much for their new and hastily glued wings.

They have now discovered that was very much not the case. It was, in fact, utter woke nonsense.

You only appoint Ange Postecoglou, with his recent Premier League record of just losing pretty much all of the games pretty much all of the time, if you have kidded yourself relegation is not something you have to think about.

And you only appoint Dyche if you’ve realised that relegation is now the only thing you have to think about.

Forest are the most textbook example of the second kind of Dyche club we can possibly imagine. As such, it is actually a very decent appointment. It’s a smaller, quieter, chastened Forest that Dyche enters than the one Nuno left just a few short weeks ago, but one that is therefore more malleable. More open to what must be done. What will be done.

You will have gruel-and-gravel Brexitball, and you will enjoy it. Or at least accept and appreciate its necessity.

And what’s even better for Dyche is that it should absolutely work a treat too. In the round, Forest have bollocksed this up. Dyche is not as good a manager as Nuno. He is even less subtle in his methods. He is a downgrade from the manager Forest had at the start of the season, but he is of the same school.

And thus a much better fit for the profile of squad he will inherit. Because it really is a very good squad indeed, and one that absolutely need not be in any of the sort of strife in which it finds itself. They are better off now than they were with Ange.

The low-block-and-counter might not be quite so effective for Dyche this season as it was for Nuno last, but it should be plenty effective enough to quickly steer Forest away from their current self-inflicted Angeball-delusion relegation fight.

Dyche will get Forest organised and efficient once more. He will prioritise what they are good at, which we already know thoroughly aligns with what he wants his teams to be good at. We saw it work time and again last season, and it will work time and again this.

We are beyond confident that Chris Wood goals in p*ss-boiling, xG-mocking draws and wins will once again soon become the norm at the City Ground. Forest will again become one of the hardest teams to play against instead of the softest and easiest. And pretty quickly too, we suspect.

This is a club that has taken its medicine and should feel the benefit, but it is Dyche who emerges the clear winner here. He won’t be able to keep the smile off his disc-bearded face.

He has everything he could possibly want. A squad of very good players who are perfectly suited to playing his specific brand of football to an extremely high level, yet at a club where a deeply humbling few months mean there will not be any quickly declared desire for anything more.

This is a club that got dizzily high on the smell of their own farts and is now choking. They don’t need crisp, crystal-clear filtered air to breathe. They just need something that isn’t their own farts.

And he gets to have a crack at Europe too, which is a magnificent development for us all.

For on Thursday, Dyche will lead out Nottingham Forest for their Europa League clash with Porto. And that is a sentence in which every single individual element would have sounded entirely absurd just 12 months ago.

Football is great, and Dyche is inevitable.