Farewell, Steve Cooper: The man who took Nottingham Forest from pity to joy

Most Nottingham Forest fans will have their own moment when they thought something special was happening under Steve Cooper.

For a couple of thousand hardy souls who had travelled to Ashton Gate on a sopping wet Tuesday night in October 2021, it will have been the moment Lyle Taylor — who, as it turned out, would be a relative footnote in the wider story — scored twice in stoppage time to snatch an implausible 2-1 win against Bristol City.

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This was Cooper’s fifth game in charge, but it wasn’t just the drama. There was a method to how Forest played after spending the previous hour behind. It wasn’t always brilliant, but it was clear-minded. There looked to be a purpose to everything. Nobody was panicking. It felt… different.

The City Ground had been a mecca of false dawns over the previous 23 years, from David Platt to Chris Hughton via Paul Hart, Colin Calderwood, Billy Davies (twice), Stuart Pearce and Sabri Lamouchi, to name just a few of the 19 previous permanent managerial appointments that had failed to get Forest back to the Premier League.

There had been bright moments in most of those spells, games to make you think that maybe this could be the one, perhaps Forest had picked a good ’un this time. Ultimately, none of them managed it. Some of them were good, some were bad, some ‘got it’ but didn’t quite make it, some inspired hope, some were likeable, some were very not likeable, some were downright embarrassing.

And then there was Cooper.

This unassuming man with a light Welsh accent, relatively guarded in public, not outwardly especially charismatic, with a slightly complicated legacy in his previous job at Swansea City, would become, within nine months, the second most important manager in the club’s history.

Because that’s who he is — with no disrespect to Harry Hallam and Billy Walker, the managers who won the club’s only two other major trophies outside the Brian Clough era, and Frank Clark who took Forest from the second tier to Europe in two years after Clough retired. Because it’s impossible to overstate what promotion in 2022 meant to the club.

The 23 years away from the Premier League had become a huge weight over the fanbase: there’s nothing wrong with perennially being in the Football League and, in the wider scheme of things, there are many worse things than simply ‘not being in the Premier League’.

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But with Forest, it had reached the point where it had become something to be pitied over. Most people you spoke to were seemingly convinced they were a top-flight club in everything but name but also watched them fail, year after year. “Forest should be in the Prem, shouldn’t they?” is a line every fan heard regularly across those 23 years, usually followed by: “Who’s your manager these days?”

It had started to look like an unfixable problem, a club nobody could make sense of, a giant ball of knotted string.

And then there was Cooper.

It was the ennui that was the worst. The mediocrity. There had been a few play-offs failures, a few brushes with relegation, one actual relegation and one subsequent promotion. But for a lot of the time, it was just a sort of dreary nothingness. Background noise. Forest were the equivalent of a fridge buzzing: quietly irritating, but not enough to get worked up over. A generation of finishing every season somewhere between eighth and who-cares.

In the 23 years away from the Premier League, Forest averaged 1.38 points per game, which, over a 46-match season, would get you about 64 points — or, to put it another way, 13th place in the 24-team Championship in their most recent season there. Or, to put it still another way, the absolute definition of mediocrity.

There was very little to get excited about, particularly from about 2014 onwards, the Lamouchi season of 2019-20 aside. Some moments charged the imagination, there were some glorious games, a few players to stir the emotions, but not many.

And then there was Cooper.

It’s not just that he was the one who finally got Forest promoted to the Premier League. He changed the way a city felt about its biggest football club. He made an effort to be more than just Forest manager, to understand Nottingham and the people. Forest mattered in a way that they hadn’t really for years. The great home-game atmospheres people marvelled at during the first season back in the top flight? That had been the case for the better part of a year.

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Go through the games. Barnsley away, the first win. That Bristol City game, the early sign that things were changing. Swansea away, when the play-offs properly looked realistic. Arsenal at home in the FA Cup, then Leicester City in the next round — Premier League teams not just beaten, but beaten comfortably. Derby County at home, Brennan Johnson scoring the winner. West Bromwich Albion at home, with that absurd Jack Colback volley from the touchline. Swansea again, 5-1, a decent team casually flicked aside, like a horse would use its tail to dismiss a fly.

Then in the Premier League. West Ham United, the first home game back, a lucky win but nobody cared. Liverpool at home, a victory out of nowhere thanks to Taiwo Awoniyi, a player absurdly written off by some only weeks earlier in his first Forest pre-season. Southampton away, Awoniyi again. Manchester City at home, Chris Wood’s goal and the 10-minute wall of noise that followed.

The trio of games that would seal survival: Brighton & Hove Albion, Southampton, Arsenal; Joe Worrall falling to his knees, the on-loan Renan Lodi bursting into tears, Cooper doing the mother of all fist pumps. Even the meaningless final game of the season, away at Crystal Palace, at which the players may as well have been as drunk as the travelling support for all anyone cared.

And of course, the big one. The play-off final against Huddersfield Town. A dog of a game, an absolute howling hound, settled by an own goal and one in which Forest were lucky not to give away two penalties. But it didn’t matter in the least. Promotion, your phone pinging with messages from people you hadn’t spoken to in months, delighted for you. It was the greatest day of most of our football-supporting lives.

The previous few years had crystallised what I wanted from supporting a football club. It wasn’t necessarily ‘promotion’ in itself — which is to say, access to the Premier League. I wanted a ‘moment’, a game that meant everything, and to be there with my parents, with whom I’ve been going to games since 1989. I got that, and it was thanks to Steve Cooper.

I was a little concerned that the game, the moment, was so big I wouldn’t care about anything after it. But as it turned out, I did care. It all mattered. Games were events again. You could go to the City Ground and expect something to happen. It didn’t always, but in some ways just the realistic expectation was enough.

There was Cooper. But he isn’t anymore.

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Maybe, from a cold and logical standpoint, this was the time to sack Cooper, maybe it wasn’t. But fans have the luxury of not being cold and logical: we’re supposed to be emotional, because otherwise what’s the point?

If there has been a good part about the constant speculation around Cooper’s position, it’s that Forest fans have been reminded to enjoy the time that remained, to be aware that there was someone to be proud of as their team’s manager, to revel in a connection not felt for years. To be in the away end for the defeat against Fulham which, at the time, felt like the end, was extraordinary: 5-0 down, a pathetic performance, embarrassing for all concerned, but for most of the second half, the fans were singing Cooper’s name.

When Marcelo Bielsa left Leeds in February last year, it was pretty easy to mock those among their support who said they would rather get relegated with him at the helm than stay in the Premier League with someone else. But I identified with that then and even more so now. Leeds and Forest will have successful managers again, but it’s unlikely that either will have this sort of relationship between stands and dugout again anytime soon.

It’s the sort of relationship that can kid you into thinking that your club is special, not like the others, the clubs that just have managers who come and go: they might be good, they might be not so good, but you don’t much care if they left. ‘We’re different’, you could think, which is probably nonsense, but does that really matter?

For a little over two years, Steve Cooper did nothing more than make a football club, thousands of people, a city, incredibly happy. And there can be no greater legacy than that.

Thanks, Steve. We’ll miss you.

(Top photo: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)

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