Angeball can’t prevent Postecoglou sack as doom-laden Forest outclassed at Newcastle

One of the most extraordinary things about Ange Postecoglou is that his players are always the very last to accept the reality unfolding around them.

He never, ever lost the Tottenham players despite the plummet down the league last season and Nottingham Forest’s committed yet futile effort to emerge with something unlikely from a trip to Newcastle shows they too haven’t given up.

It will make no difference. The fans have given up. We’re pretty sure Mr Marinakis has given up. Those incredible, inspirational speeches Postecoglou delivers clearly make his players feel 10 feet tall and ready to run through brick walls. But no matter how much Postecoglou might encourage you to ‘enjoy your lunch’ he just cannot at this elevated level bend reality to his will with sufficient force or regularity.

Seasoned Angeball watchers will have seen a lot of familiar elements in this 2-0 defeat at St James’ Park. The popular myth is that Postecoglou simply plays headless-chicken attacking football with no thought of defence.

READ MORE: Who will be next Nottingham Forest manager after Ange Postecoglou sack?

It’s only half-true, because sometimes he also plays desperate all-out defensive football with no real thought of attacking.

Crucially, in both these two Angeball environments, the attacking and defending of set-pieces is never more than an afterthought.

Forest scrapped and battled and harried their way to reach half-time goalless, restricting a Newcastle team themselves not exactly full of attacking confidence and brio yet in the post-Isak world to half-chances or less.

But Postecoglou seems incapable of striking a balance. Incapable of setting a team up to be either secure in defence or threatening in attack without entirely and fatally compromising the other.

Forest just couldn’t create anything to land a blow of their own, and that leaves you needing to be both flawless and lucky for an entire game to get anything out of it at all.

Luck ran out first for Forest as Bruno Guimaraes lashed home a long-range strike on the hour to force Postecoglou into switching modes. All-out defence gave way to all-out attack as Omari Hutchinson, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Igor Jesus were all introduced within minutes of Plan A(ngeball) going awry.

It wasn’t enough. It never felt like being enough. Matz Sels made a couple of fine close-range saves to keep Forest nominally in the contest and Postecoglou theoretically employed, but flawlessness soon joined luck in falling by the wayside Elliott Anderson’s impressive return to his former club was pockmarked by a weary, desperate lunge at Guimaraes after a heavy touch to allow Nick Woltemade to continue his fine start to life as Newcastle’s new cult hero with a penalty despatched in thunderously dismissive fashion.

Newcastle do still have concerns about the huff-and-puff nature of much of their attacking play on a day when their top-class defensive and midfield stability were never really challenged by a Forest team now staring a relegation battle squarely in the face.

But the real discomfort belongs to Postecoglou and Forest’s decision-makers, who have a huge decision to make as the international break gives everyone a troubling time to think on what’s going on and whether Postecoglou is in any way the right man for what is now a relegation fight.

It’s not like this is 20-20 hindsight, either. Whatever the political machinations behind the scenes that left Nuno Espirito Santo’s position apparently untenable, appointing the wildly different and so recently exposed Postecoglou as his replacement always looked like a madness.

‘It’s going to be tough for him until he gets that first win’ was the immediate post-match assessment on Sky Sports.

But this is a man who has now won just one of his last 16 Premier League games – and that at home against one of the worst Premier League teams of all time in Southampton.

It is now surely likely that the ‘first win’ will never come. He probably won’t even get another chance to prove he always wins something in his second month.