Steve Cooper and an unexpected turn of events worthy of Roald Dahl

Following a fifth consecutive defeat that left Nottingham Forest rock bottom of the Premier League table on Monday, one national daily exclusively reported that the offer of a new and improved contract for their manager Steve Cooper had been withdrawn. As votes of confidence in football managers go, it wasn’t exactly on a par with that time Leicester announced they would like to “make absolutely clear [our] unwavering support for First Team Manager, Claudio Ranieri” before sacking him less than a fortnight later.

Since their most recent defeat, Cooper’s imminent dismissal has been written about and discussed at length in newspapers, on podcasts and phone-ins and assorted other platforms, with many pondering the apparent injustice of moving so quickly to bin off a man who had performed a minor miracle in returning the club to the Premier League after more than two decades in exile, before being asked to keep them there with a brand new squad featuring so many different new players that the initiation ceremonies in which they are asked to sing in front of their new team-mates took far longer than a Eurovision song contest.

After several days of speculation, Forest’s owners released the inevitable statement, prompting reporters to scramble in a bid to cut-and-paste the news that Cooper had left his role at the club, been thanked for his hard work and would always be welcome at the City Ground. Except in a turn of events of so unexpected it might have been written by Roald Dahl and featured a housewife who bludgeoned her philandering husband with a frozen leg of lamb she subsequently served up for dinner to the policemen searching her home for the murder weapon, Forest announced they had offered Cooper a new and improved