Sad that Forest’s shopping spree may cost Cooper

STeVe Cooper’s first notable success as a manager was winning the Under 17 World Cup with england in 2017.

The tournament was in India and not logistically easy, but over a month Cooper steered 21 boys to a highly significant age-group triumph.

Talk now to some of those players — men like Phil Foden and Jadon Sancho — about Cooper and they will speak of his coaching, but first his ability to unite a group, to steer a disparate squad of players uniformly along one path.

Many of those players stayed close. Some — such as Conor Gallagher, Rhian Brewster and Marc Guehi — joined Cooper at Swansea City on loan. There’s an enduring bond.

Cooper is now the manager of Nottingham Forest and things are different. The Welshman joined Forest last September with the club bottom of the Championship table and took them to the Premier League and the last eight of the Fa Cup. It was a thrilling ride and those who were part of it talk in simple terms of how he did it.

‘ It was about unity, ’ midfielder Ryan Yates told me back in august. ‘ He brought everybody together. None of my managers had done that here before.’

at the start, Cooper met with members of Brian Clough’s great teams. It wasn’t a publicity thing. He wanted to know what Forest meant. He wanted to learn a little of how Clough did it. He wanted to steal a little bit of that and, in his own way, he did.

Of the squad that took Forest up for the first time in 24 years, nine players appeared in more than 38 league games. Cooper’s astonishing success was built around a consistent spine, a group of like-minded men. It had been exactly the same at Swansea.

and now, in the Premier League, things have changed. Forest’s squad had to be overhauled. There were too many loan players. Others were out of contract.

Forest’s response — driven in part by owner evangelos Marinakis and his son Miltiadis — has been to buy and keep buying. during the summer months, it seemed ambitious. Now it just seems self-defeating.

Forest have signed 22 players at a cost of £150million. The team who face Leicester at the King Power Stadium tonight will feature three — maybe four — of the team who won last May’s play-off final. How Cooper is supposed to make that work is hard to fathom.

He has remained publicly supportive of the club’s policy but what alternative does he have? To say otherwise would bring him a heap of publicity a quiet, reserved man does not need.

But no manager would wish to manage under these circumstances in europe’s most competitive league.

Coaches — whatever their respective strengths — always need a core group on whom they can rely. Cooper is still trying to find out who should be in his. It is the equivalent of starting pre- season in September rather than July.

The 42-year- old has done what he can to maintain some consistency. Yates, an academy product, is vice- captain. Joe Worrall, a Nottingham boy, is captain.

But Forest’s squad looks like it has been put together in a hurry simply because it has. Many of the foundations and principles that took Forest places last season are now under threat.

Cooper’s club skipper last season, for example, was Lewis Grabban, a 33- year- old forward who didn’t always play. But the common purpose then was such that he remained invested and was able to come off the bench and score a goal that beat arsenal in the Fa Cup. These are the little things that help a team tick over and succeed.

Forest — on a run of four successive league defeats — do not look like a cohesive team now. How can they?

and the loudest noise is talk of Cooper’s future. They say they may sack Forest’s miracle man.

How predictable. How reactionary. How very sad.