Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis is way out of kilter with his fans when it comes to keeping Steve Cooper at the City Ground

• Marinakis has been unafraid to swing the axe at Greek sister club Olympiacos 
• Fans applauded and chanted Cooper’s name despite watching 5-0 thrashing 
• No one cares like Steve Cooper cares about Forest, the club means so much to him – It’s All Kicking Off

It would appear Evangelos Marinakis takes a similar approach to discarding litter as he does managers. After Nottingham Forest’s drubbing at Fulham on Wednesday, their owner’s accreditation was found in a hedge near Craven Cottage.

If that points to boiling blood within the Greek shipping tycoon, then it will serve as little comfort to Steve Cooper that his employer has this week appointed a fifth manager in 14 months at Olympiacos.

These are desperately precarious times for Cooper, whose side were crushed 5-0 at Fulham for a fourth straight loss.

All indications point to the Welshman having one more game to save his job, at Wolves on Saturday, but Marinakis is not known for allowing too much water into the hull before launching a skipper over the side.

And therein lies the conflict at Forest, and with it an interesting dynamic — Marinakis’s instincts would be out of kilter with those who go to watch the team.

Evangelos Marinakis has been unafraid to swing the axe at Forest’s sister club Olympiacos

Marinakis allegedly threw his accreditation pass from Craven Cottage in a bush outside the ground after their 5-0 defeat to Fulham 

Steve Cooper is under severe pressure following a crushing 5-0 defeat against Fulham

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It is accepted wisdom that the game is up for a manager when the crowd turns, but that hasn’t happened to Cooper. It certainly didn’t on Wednesday, when he approached the visiting fans and patted his heart in apology for what had been a dire display.

In response, the fans sang his name and clapped. Not just a few, but the majority. It is understood Marinakis was on his way out by then, which would be a shame because, in the fire and fury of football, it was a rare reminder that good memories count.

In Cooper, those supporters see a team who are growing more hopeless by the week but a manager who achieved miracles that are not so easily dismissed.

He arrived in September 2021 with Forest bottom of the Championship and ended the same season with promotion to the Premier League — their first in a generation. It was an astonishing act of resurrection and worth a fortune to his club.

That Cooper then withstood the endless churn of transfers — 22 new players in a chaotic summer of preparation for the Premier League — and kept Forest up last season was almost as remarkable.

For those achievements to outweigh the calamities of the present day ought to be seen as heartening in an environment where the vogue will always lend itself to twitchy judgments.

The manager said that he was ’embarrassed’ by the support of the crowd on a dismal night

It is unlikely to save Cooper — there were whispers last season that Marinakis wanted to make a change whenever the blips extended beyond a couple of fixtures. Other managers were sounded out, which is fairly routine, but some sources around the club have also held the view that Cooper was partially kept safe because the right alternative could not be brought in. To that end, there is a level of surprise in Cooper being given another game now, with his team in 16th place.

Cooper was the first to acknowledge as much on Wednesday, saying he was ‘embarrassed’ by how warmly he was received in the wake of such a dismal showing.

‘I don’t deserve that support,’ he added. ‘The players don’t deserve that support. I just said to the players that regardless of who is playing, who the manager is, you can’t let these people down like that. I take responsibility for it.’

In this era of the scapegoat, it was the sort of honesty that should go a long way, not just with fans who need far less convincing, but with the man in charge. The worry is that fan sentiment is not the currency it once was and the reality might closer resemble what happened to Marinakis’s accreditation.

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