The ridiculous Nuno and Postecoglou failure that Dyche has already solved at Forest after £192m spend | OneFootball

It is the sort of impact a £192.6m summer spend should buy, but not one Nottingham Forest had been closing to feeling all season.

With a crucial home game against Leeds finely poised, Sean Dyche blinked first. He made a triple substitution on the hour mark while Daniel Farke sought only to settle.

Nine minutes later, Forest were in the lead thanks to the divine intervention of Omari Hutchinson, one of the many victims of the turmoil at the City Ground this season.

By full time he had won a penalty which helped seal Dyche’s first Premier League win in charge.

“He came on and I thought he was terrific,” said the manager, who divulged some details of a recent heart-to-heart held with the winger.

If his season with Ipswich was a crash course in Barclays then this has been an absurd parody of the English top-flight rollercoaster.

Hutchinson was collateral damage in the civil war between Nuno and Edu, costing him a place in the club’s Europa League squad. Dyche sought to point out the “difference” between being “left out” and simply not “included” after the game but was also at pains to point out “it was before my time”.

And quite right, too. His straightforward, matter-of-fact pragmatism can make Dyche an easy lightning rod for criticism but that is precisely what Forest needed to move on from a series of bad decisions.

The role of Hutchinson had meaning beyond those 90 minutes. It underlined how Dyche is already managing what he inherited better than those who came before him.

In both the 2022/23 and 2023/24 seasons, the only clubs to use more players in the Premier League than Forest were those who finished bottom.

Southampton desperately rifled through 36 players and Sheffield United rattled off 35, with Forest trying out 33 different options both times.

Last season, no club used fewer players than Forest’s 23, with Nuno Espirito Santo founding their brilliance on consistency and familiarity. This campaign, no club has used more than Forest’s 25 as the need for a bigger squad to cope with a busier schedule has hit home.

But while Nuno and Ange Postecoglou struggled to make sense of the hands dealt to them over a summer of significant investment and player turnover, Dyche is finding solutions.

The first 10 goals of Forest’s season in all competitions came before they had made a substitution in those games. Under Nuno and Postecoglou they had not scored a single post-substitution non-penalty goal in 11 matches.

That streak was snapped in Dyche’s first home Premier League game when Ryan Yates came off the bench to set up Morgan Gibbs-White against Manchester United, then eviscerated by Hutchinson’s brilliance in his first domestic win at the City Ground.

It matters not the size of the squad, it’s how you use it. And Dyche has already shown he can excel where Nuno and Postecoglou summarily failed.