A club hero forever having brought Forest back to the Premier League, Cooper just wasn’t getting the results Evangelos Marinakis desired and demanded.

Marinakis, with a heavy heart, decided to pull the trigger and immediately bring in former Tottenham Hotspur boss Nuno Espirito Santo.

The move raised eyebrows given his nightmare spell at Spurs but Marinakis believes that Nuno is the right man for the job.

Gary Neville makes Nottingham Forest prediction

Nuno took charge of Forest for the first time on Saturday afternoon but sadly fell to a 3-2 defeat against Bournemouth.

Forest were hit hard by a ridiculous red card for defender Willy Boly and cruelly saw Bournemouth grab a late winner.

Nuno will be delighted with how his team fought with 10 men and will be looking for similar resilience moving forward.

Pundit Gary Neville has now given his view on Forest, telling The Gary Neville Podcast that he thinks Nuno makes sense for Forest.

Neville noted that Cooper has a reputation for playing progressive football, but he was actually playing deep and looking to counter-attack.

With that in mind, Neville thinks that Nuno is a good fit for the situation based on his work at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Neville predicts that Forest ‘will be okay’ in the fight to stay in the Premier League, believing that things will improve once players adjust to his methods.

“Do you know something, instinctively, when I first heard that Nuno had gone in, I thought ‘Steve Cooper plays great football, he’s a coach, he plays out from the back’, but he’s not been playing like that,” said Neville. “I think, actually, what we saw last week against Spurs on Friday Night Football was a team defending deep and looking to counter-attack and play five at the back.”

“Nuno does that very well, he did that very well at Wolves, where he played five at the back, he is methodical, he does get a team playing with a pattern, so I actually think Forest will be okay once he gets a bit of work into their legs and work into their system and I think that, generally, it may suit them to get through this season with Nuno in the sense that that’s how they have been playing, with five at the back and playing deep to counter-attack,” he added.

Nuno recently won a league title with Al Ittihad in Saudi Arabia, but that hasn’t really repaired his reputation after his time at Tottenham.

It’s easy to forget just how good Nuno was at Wolves though, enjoying four superb years in charge at Molineux.

Yes, Nuno is a more conservative manager than Cooper but he took Wolves into the Europa League – and Forest fans would be buzzing with that if he can repeat the trick.

Nuno needs some time to get his methods across but his Premier League experience will hopefully ensure that Forest – currently two points above the drop zone – don’t get dragged into the bottom three any time soon.